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"Mellinger travelled 26,000 miles and pieced together over 3,000  individual images to create this, one of the most stunning panoramas of  our galaxy every assembled.\r\nPiecing together  3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution  panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its  centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University,  describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue  of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An  interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website.\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human  eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and  nebulae,&amp;quot; Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful  for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.\r\n\r\nMellinger  spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital  photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan.  After the photographs were taken, &amp;quot;the real work started,&amp;quot; Mellinger  said.\r\n\r\nSimply cutting and pasting the images together into one big  picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection  of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in  much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In  order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had  to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model-and  hundreds of hours in front of a computer.\r\n\r\nAnother problem  Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each  photograph.\r\n\r\n&amp;quot;Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow,  as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is  virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that  has a perfectly uniform background,&amp;quot; Mellinger said.\r\n\r\nTo fix this,  Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data  allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He  could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph.  That way they would fit together without looking patchy.\r\n\r\nThe  result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see  from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648  megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.\r\n[Gizmodo viaUniversity  of Chicago via Axel  Mellinger via Examiner via io9]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2009/11/02/find-648megapixel-image-galaxy/>