Have you ever thought, “Wow, I’m sure I’d like to feel extremely small and impressed right now”? Do we ever have the solution for you?
After more than a decade of meticulous work, Finnish astrophotographer JP Metsavainio has released an absolutely amazing 1.7 gigapixel mosaic of the Milky Way galaxy plane.
Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic began in 2009, with the photography of various nebulae around the Milky Way as independent compositions.
The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is about 1,250 hours. (To upload the file full up image with 11.5 MB of glory, click here.)
(© JP Metsavainio)
“It took almost twelve years to complete this mosaic image,” Metsavainio wrote on his blog, Astro Anarchy.
“The reason for a long period of time is of course the size of the mosaic and the fact that the image is very deep. Another reason is that I filmed most of the mosaic frames as individual compositions and published them as works. of independent art.
“This leads to a kind of set of complex images that partly overlap with many areas without images between and around the frames. I’ve captured the missing data from time to time over the years and last year I was able to post many sub mosaic images like I prepared them first “.
Joining the images was a matter of matching the stars and superimposing them on Photoshop, with small adjustments between the frames to match the color balance and light curves, he explained.
The resulting image is about 100,000 pixels in diameter, made up of 234 individual mosaic panels, covering a sky area of 125 by 22 degrees.
(© JP Metsavainio)
This is a significant part of the galactic plane, which includes about 20 million stars, and the full-size color image measuring 7,000 by 1,300 pixels is truly amazing. The colors you see represent the emission of ionized elements; hydrogen is shown in green, sulfur in red, and oxygen in blue.
“I think this is the first image showing the Milky Way at this resolution and depth in all three color channels,” Metsavainio said on the PetaPixel photography website.
(© JP Metsavainio)
Metsavainio offers a wonderfully dazzling view of our home galaxy and one we can’t help but miss. If you’re not sure where to start or want to know more about what you’re looking at, Metsavainio has usefully posted a series of mosaic frames on his blog, showing individual nebulae.
We can also wholeheartedly recommend visiting your wallet for an awesome walk through your work. His 3D animations of nebulae, in particular, will fill you up wanderlust for interstellar space travel.