Incredible photographic map of the entire sky

[starfinder]

I know this may be old news for some, but for those who don't already know, do visit this website for an incredible photographic map of the entire night sky:
http://skysurvey.org/

I came across a May 2011 article on this today on the Sky & Telescope website:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/observin ... 86019.html

The astrophotographer, Nick Risinger, photographed the entire celestial sphere in great detail with an 85mm lens. Each frame was just 12 degrees across and he stitched together 624 fields (from over 37,000 individual stacked exposures). (Add: The result is what he calls the Photopic Sky Survey.)

The best part of the website is that you can pan about the photograph and zoom into quite some detail (the details increases as it loads from the website). The photograph is centred on the Milky Way.


This gives us a whole new broad perspective of we've been seeing at dark sky sites all these years. In just a few minutes, I've realised that:

- The glow above and below the central dust lane of our Milky Way is very broad and bright. This is probably due to the vast concentration of stars around the disk and stands in great contrast to the relative blackness beyond that.

(BTW, this confirms the "innumerable number of stars" that I've posted about many times before, as being visible when panning about some Milky Way regions like Puppis and Cygnus with binoculars. Far far richer and larger than the individual open star clusters that's written about in the books.)

- It is obvious that some objects such as the Orion Constellation and its vast areas of nebulosity are foreground objects, due to its sheer apparent size as compared with e.g. the Andromeda galaxy and the Centaurus A galaxy.

- There are as many if not more stars in the Milky Way's disk than grains of sand on a beach. Just see for yourself!

[jimmyleong]

simply amazing..... simply dedicated....

[acc]

Can buy a print copy from Sky and Telescope and have it framed; makes for a wonderful focal point.