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Tuesday, August 8, 2023
Grand Mosaic of the Milky Way is now large than ever
The new panorama image was published today in Finnish Tähdet ja Avaruus Magazine
This and other of my astronomical photographs can be seen in my NIGHT FEVER exhibition in Helsinki.
The Grand Mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy II
This is the only photo in the World showing the Northern Milky Way so deep and detailed, now it's large than ever!
Click for a large image, 7000 x 1150 pixels
NOTE, image of the Full Moon as a scale in lover left corner.
NOTE, all material in this blog is under copyright, any kind of usage without authors permission is forbidden.
- Panorama spans 145 x 22 degrees of sky (Full Moon covers 0,5 degrees of sky)
- Resolution 120.000 x 18.000 pixels
- Photos has 2.2 gigapixels in it, the spatial resolution is equal to 8.8 gigapixel image from color camera since all the channels are in native resolution.
- There are least nine confirmed supernova remnants in this panorama
- About 25 million stars are visible in the photo
- Distance to the nebulae in the image between 350 to 20.000 light years
- Exposure time over 1500 hours between 2009 - 2021
- 301 individual images are stitched together seamlessly
- It took about 12 years to finalize this photo
- Narrowband image from light of ionized elements, hydrogen = green, sulfur = red and oxygen = blue
- Processing time for the whole panorama, way too large part of my life
Click for a large image
NOTE, all material in this blog is under copyright, any kind of usage without authors permission is forbidden.
11500 x 3400 pixels
The reason I keep doing my slow work is an endless
curiosity, I love to show how wonderful our world really is. That's how I feel at front of
everything I'm able to see through my photography.
Photographed area of sky is showing a large part of Northern Milky Way in high resolution. Beside the size, it's very deep, meaning that it shows extremely dim and unimaged nebulae across the galaxy plane. One of the reasons for this massive panorama project was a fact, that there was no such an image anywhere in the world. I had personal need for the photo like this since I wanted to use it as a map to the new adventures.
Revealing the hidden beauty of our universe is my passion. I stand in rapt adoration before all that I see. When art meets science, the results can be quite mind-blowing.
Astronomical
photography is a very time-consuming process. If I want to have a color image,
I have to shoot each target least three times through a different filter to
have all three-color channels needed for color image. Also, the exposure times
can be very long, in my case even hundreds of hours for some very dim
objects. An average exposure time is around 25 hours per image. Also everything has
to be carefully pre planned.
I made imaging plans over ten years ago, I
wrote first ideas about this imaging project to my little black Moleskin
notebook. I was aware at the time, that it will take a decade to be
finalized but it doesn't bother me since I love long projects, they are
giving a purpose and the goal to my work as an artist.
I needed to develop many new working
methods to be able to control this massive project. I needed to get them ready
first since ones started, the project can't be changed anymore without
canceling it. Everything needs to be spot on, the planning of composition and
its relation to the Milky Way objects, many technical aspects, like how to
handle a data from different optics with a different spatial resolution etc. I
won't go very deep into technical details, since the complex technique needed
is just a tool to make my art.
you must be able to get along with them too. I felt like that, when I was stitching pieces
together and some of them didn't fit the way I wanted and I had to reshoot them. That easily took months, or years. but at the end, everything slides together smoothly without any visible seams.
I'm a perfectionist, when dealing with my photography. This feature is essential for the great results but it also can cause problems. This photo could be ready maybe five years earlier, if I could leave some extremely dim targets out or leave them less detailed but I simply couldn't do that. When the photo was ready, I didn't remember all of those sleepless cold nights, I remembered the joy I felt when the most difficult parts got ready.
NOTE, all material in this blog is under copyright, any kind of usage without authors permission is forbidden.
Step 3,
2019 -2021, SOLVING THE BIG PUZZLE
Finally at 2019, after so many years, I had enough material to start
working with the final mosaic image. The work took about two years due to
complex mosaic structure and massive amount of image material. I also
needed to shoot lots of missing material for the mosaic at the same time.
I used the Cartes du Ciel, a star map software, for planning and a
preliminary fit the individual frames.
Click for a large image
AND FINALLY
At October 2021, after 12 years, 1500 hours of exposures and countless hours of work
The Grand Mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy II
NOTE, all material in this blog is under copyright, any kind of usage without authors permission is forbidden.
Getting to a last piece of the puzzle is always a thrilling process. Many
of us know, how frustrating it can be to notice, that one piece is missing. That's
happened to me too. I was sure that I shot the piece about three years ago
but couldn't find it anywhere from my hard drives. As a result, I had to wait
several extremely long weeks to be able to reshoot the missing piece to get
this massive puzzle finalized.
5 comments:
Aivan käsittämättömän suuren työn olet tehnyt!! Suu loksahti auki noita kuvia katsellessa. KIITOS kun jaoit kuvat ja tämän kokemuksen!! Ei voi muuta kuin arvostaa ja ihmetellä...
Vautsi!
This is really beautiful and a ton of work! If you are looking for a way to present the whole image to the world (or even locally to yourself) at full resolution, take a look at https://github.com/google/neuroglancer which we use for displaying huge electron microscopy datasets. There might be astronomy packages that are more specialized, but it's what came to mind the soon as I saw this since I work with it everyday. I am the author of the https://github.com/seung-lab/igneous package that is used for converting raw images into these kinds of volumes and I'd be happy to give advice if this is useful.
There are other methods you can use such as https://imagej.net/plugins/bdv/ as well that I am less familiar with.
I'm sure you already have something analogous that you're using, but just wanted to point this out in case it's helpful.
Thanks for sharing your journey and art with us! It's inspiring for this extremely amateur astronomer to see this kind of work.
Pakko sanoa että sulla on ollut aivan mieletön projekti, hienoa nähdä noin suurta intohimoa kuvaukseen.
Wow What a work!!! Good man and deserves all respect!!
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