• 
• 
• 

Community

Awesome Astral Works

Upon the relatively recent introduction of digital cameras that could make really low noise images at really high ISOs, landscape photographers started showing us things we hadn’t really seen in photographs before—like the starry nighttime sky in sharp detail. Rather than the star trails typical of long exposures at low ISOs, these high-ISO images make it possible to see what a starry sky really looks like above the landscape. It also means that now, in real detail, we have a good picture of the Milky Way. Leave it to an astronomer to take that one step farther and deliver an awesome image of the Milky Way in exquisite detail. Axel Mellinger combined more than 3000 individual exposures to create a 648-megapixel, 7.7-gigabyte panorama of the Milky Way. He describes the creation of the image, and provides an interactive high-res version, on his web site. It’s the first astral image I’ve ever seen that feels somehow familiar. While it delivers stars 1000 times too faint for the human eye to see, it still shows a cosmic structure that we can, and do, see from earth. What a fascinating combination of the seen and unseen, the natural and the otherworldly.

Axel Mellinger

Add Comment