The whole night sky from 37,440 exposure photos

A marketing manager in Seattle (USA) quit his job to spend the whole time shooting the sky for the past year and created a grand panorama of 5,000 megapixels.

360-degree photo of the night sky.

In March 2010, 28-year-old Nick Risinger, and his brother went to the desert in Nevada to record the first photos of the Photopic Sky Survey project. Realizing his work was too massive, he decided to quit his job and persuade his father who was living in Washington to join.

Nick Risinger uses 6 synchronized astronomy cameras to produce
big picture behind his back. Photo: AP.

Risinger and his father drove all day, and at night, he set up six cameras to track the movements of stars in the sky and absorbed thousands of photos at once. Meanwhile, his father was still asleep. Their journey is not only in regions like Arizona, Texas or California, Colorado in the US but also to South Africa where the constellations cannot be observed visually in the northern hemisphere.

Risinger is about to shoot in Colorado, where the night temperature is -21 degrees Celsius.
Photo: SkySurvey.

Back in Seattle, Risinger began using software to stitch 37,440 exposure photos together and create a panoramic picture panorama with a 360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets, stars with natural colors. of them. Viewers can enlarge each position of the work to find the constellation of Orion or the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Scorpion (right) and galactic constellation in Risinger's panorama picture.

" This is not a scientifically useful image. It is educational and artistic," Risinger said. He divided the sky into 624 parts and during a year, he had to schedule accurately to get the necessary photos in both the northern and southern hemispheres.

According to AP , Risinger completed the project two weeks ago and the website posted on Skysurvey.org is attracting tens of thousands of hits.