Nick Risinger, an amateur astronomer and photographer from Seattle, quit his day job and set out to document the entire Milky Way through photographs.  Such an undertaking required a lot of planning and calculating.  It required traveling 60,000 miles by air and land back and forth from the Western United States to South Africa in order to find locales with as little light pollution as possible.  He used 6 Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome cameras with Zeiss Sonnar 85mm f2.8 lenses specially mounted on a Takahashi custom mount that rotated in sync with the Earth’s spin.  All of that was combined with some very detailed calculations and computer work to be certain there were no gaps in the final image.  The result is a 360 degree, 5,000 mega pixel view of the entire night sky stitched together from 37,440 separate exposures.  Dubbed the Photopic Sky Survey, the amazing image allows you to see 20-30 million stars with incredible clarity.  The final image allows you to zoom and pan and explore the amazing night sky in a way that only a 5,000 mega pixel image can do.

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