Film-based Milky Way Panorama Image
(assembled between 1997 and 2000)

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!).

 

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Copyright © 2000–2010 Axel Mellinger. All rights reserved.