Axel Mellinger's

All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 1.0

Note: the new, all-digital panorama image is here.

History

By 1996, RAM prices had dropped low enough to allow the processing of high-resolution digitized astrophotos on a home PC. My early attempts included contrast stretching and image stacking, as shown in this example. Faced with the limited field of view and grain-limited resolution of photographs taken on 35 mm film, I decided to venture further into the field of digital image processing and explore the possibilities of stitching together several images into a single high-resolution mosaic.

Three years and 51 wide-angle images later, an All-Sky panorama was completed. The individual photographs were taken on Kodak PJM-2 and PJ-400 film with a Minolta SRT-101 or XD-5 camera equipped with a 28 mm lens and riding piggyback on my Super Polaris DX mount. Exposure times at f/4 were ranging from 30 to 45 minutes. My observing sites were places as far apart as California's White Mountain Range and Cederberg Observatory in South Africa's Western Cape Province. A special transformation technique was used to eliminate distortions introduced by the camera lens. Thanks to computer processing, the image can be presented in a variety of different views. Shown here are an Aitoff projection in galactic coordinates (left) and an equidistant azimuthal (polar) projection (right). At full resolution (not displayed here for obvious reasons) the file size is 300 MB.

The image is part of NASA's Multiwavelength Milky Way poster (the only contribution from an amateur astronomer!).

Click on the images to view them in full size.

Confused by the vast number of stars? Can't find the constellations? Here is a strip centered on the galactic equator with constellation outlines.

Click here to see a Virtual Reality All-Sky Panorama!

Articles

An article describing the digital processing steps of the film-based panorama is available as HTML for online viewing and PDF for printing.
D. di Cicco, "There's No Place Like Home", Sky and Telescope, Nov. 1999, pp. 137-140.
A. Mellinger, "Die Milchstraße im Computer: Entstehung eines Himmelspanoramas", Sterne und Weltraum, p. 174, Feb./March 2000.
K. Kizer Whitt and A. Mellinger, "The Milky Way from the inside'', Astronomy 29(11), 58 - 63 (2001).
An article about the (film-based) panorama (Star Forming Regions along the Milky Way: A Panoramic View) is the first chapter in the Handbook of Star Forming Regions, Bo Reipurth (ed.), Vol. I, Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2008.
An article about the new panorama is available on arXiv/astro-ph.

Purchasing prints and high-resolution electronic images

Sky Publishing Corporation is selling two different poster versions of the panorama:
- A galactic projection called "The Milky Way", showing the sky within +/-40 degrees of the galactic equator
- An equidistant azimuthal projection (called "The Celestial Sphere") showing the entire northern and southern hemisphere of the sky.
For details, please visit their online store and go to the "Posters" product category.
For high-quality custom size prints, check out Hutech's web site.
For high-resolution electronic files, please see the notes for the new digital panorama..
In 2002, Kosmos published a star atlas (in German) based on the panorama image.
New 2008 edition:

Axel Mellinger, Susanne M. Hoffmann:
Der große Kosmos-Himmelsatlas
English edition published by Firefly Books Ltd.:

Axel Mellinger, Susanne M. Hoffmann:
The New Atlas of the Stars

Other images

All-Sky Milky Way Panorama 1.0

History

Articles

Purchasing prints and high-resolution electronic images

Other images

Would you like to see more astrophotography? Please visit my Astrophotography web site with lots of deep-sky and comet pictures.