Have you ever thought to yourself, “Lord, I sure wish I could feel extremely small and terrified right now”? We ever have the solution for you!
After more than a decade of meticulous work, Finnish astrophotographer JP Metsavainio launched an absolute 1.7-gigapixel mosaic that escaped the jaws of the Milky Way galaxy.
Metsavainio has been publishing his astrophotography online since 2007, but his work on the mosaic began in 2009, photographing various nebulae around the Milky Way as independent compositions.
The total exposure time between 2009 and 2021 is approximately 1,250 hours. (To upload the file full image in its glory of 11.5 MB, click here.)
(© JP Metsavainio)
“It took almost twelve years to complete this mosaic image,” Metsavainio wrote on his blog, Astro Anarchy.
“The reason for a long time is naturally the size of the mosaic and the fact that the image is very deep. Another reason is that I filmed most of the mosaic frames as individual compositions and I publish them as independent works of art.
“This leads to a kind of complex set of images that partially overlaps with a lot of unimaginable areas between and around the frames. I recorded the missing data from time to time in the years and last year I was able to publish many sub-mosaic images as I prepared them first “.
Joining the images was a matter of matching the stars and overlapping them in Photoshop, with minor changes between frames to fit the color balance and light curves, he explained.
The resulting image has approximately 100,000 pixels, consisting of 234 individual mosaic panels, covering an area of the sky with 125 degrees 22.
(© JP Metsavainio)
This is a significant part of the galactic plane, including about 20 million stars, and the full-size color image, which measures 7,000 by 1,300 pixels, is truly impressive. The colors you see represent the emission from the ionized elements; hydrogen is presented in green, sulfur in red and oxygen in blue.
“I think this is the first image that shows the Milky Way in this resolution and depth at all three color channels,” Metsavainio told PetaPixel photography site.
(© JP Metsavainio)
It offers a magnificent blinding view of our home galaxy and one in which we cannot help but get lost. If you are not sure where to start or want to learn more about what you are looking at, Metsavainio has posted a series of mosaic frames on his blog, featuring individual nebulae.
We can also wholeheartedly recommend you to visit his portfolio to take an amazing walk through his body of work. Its 3D nebula animations, in particular, will fill you with absolute loss of appetite for interstellar space travel.