In what can only be called a true labor of love, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to to take thousands of photos of the night sky. Merging them all into one massive panoramic view, he has created what is quite possibly the world’s largest and highest resolution image of the night sky. Along the way he encountered several issues with varying brightness and distortions, requiring some interesting solutions.
“Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background,” Mellinger said.
To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.
