Man captures night sky in 37,440 exposures

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.Other sky surveys have preceded this one, including the Digitized Sky Survey, a source for Google Sky. Many serve scientific purposes and were shot in red and blue to measure the temperature of stars, Risinger said. He shot in a third color, green, to give the photo added depth and richness, he said.

"What a labor of love it is!" said Andrew Fraknoi, senior educator at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. "Professional astronomers are now doing much deeper surveys of small regions of the sky, using big telescopes. But every once in a while it's nice to step back and have such a beautiful photographic record of the whole sky."


website-- http://skysurvey.org/
Times article-- http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2015030274_apusnightsky.html

A couple of days ago. Really fantastic.

What's really cool about amateur astonomy is that anyone can do it. All you need, at the most basic level, is a telescope and a good digital camera. Most amateur astronomy photos are actually multiple photos stitched together or superimposed, sometimes hundreds of them, but this guy's stuff is really special. I put it up on the projector and let my students look at it. What that had to do with WWI British poetry I have no idea, but it was too cool to pass up. Teenagers' minds = blown.

amateur astronomy photos on the photog forums. It is a great technique made much, much easier by the use of modern high quality digital cameras and editing software. This is an amazing use of these techniques.

incredible...

sP

In every way! Thank you, The Blue Flower!

Sending it to my daughter so she can explore it with her little astronauts.