SEATTLE — Nick Risinger has always gazed up at the sky. But last
year the amateur astronomer and photographer quit his day job as
a Seattle marketing director and lugged six synchronized cameras
about 60,000 miles to capture an image of the entire night sky.
Risinger, 28, set up his rack of cameras in high-elevation
locales in the Western U.S. and South Africa, timing photo
shoots around new moons when nights were long and dark. He
programmed his six cameras to track the stars as they moved
across the sky and simultaneously snapped thousands of photos.
He then stitched 37,440 exposures together into a spectacular,
panoramic survey sky that he posted online two weeks ago. The
photo reveals a 360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets and
stars in their true natural colors. Viewers can zoom in on
portions of the 5,000-megapixel image to find Orion or the Large
Magellanic Cloud. "I wanted to share what I thought was
possible," said Risinger, a first-time astrophotographer. "We
don't see it like this. This is much