Axel Mellinger’s Milky Way
01 Nov 2009 1 Comment
in The Universe Tags: Space, Star, Telescope, Universe
A new panoramic image of the full night sky — with the Milky Way as its centerpiece — has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs.
The panorama’s creator, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University, spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan.
”This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said.
To combine these images, a simple cutting and pasting job would not suffice. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model — and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.
The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.
Galileo
25 Aug 2009 Leave a Comment
in The Universe Tags: Galileo, Space, Telescope
August 25, 2009–Galileo Galilei peers at the cosmos through a telescope circa 1620, as seen in an undated drawing.
Just over 400 years ago, Galileo–then chair of mathematics at Italy’s University of Padua–got word that Dutch glass makers had invented a device that allowed viewers to see very distant objects as if they were nearby.
The mathematician soon acquired a Dutch instrument, and on August 25, 1609, he presented an improved, more powerful telescope of his own design to the senate of the city-state of Venice. The government officials were so impressed with Galileo’s telescope that they rewarded the professor with a higher salary and tenure for life at his university.
At the time, Galileo was touting the telescope for commercial and military applications, such as watching ships at sea. But in the fall of 1609 Galileo turned his telescope to the heavens, setting into motion a new kind of science: telescopic astronomy.
