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SEATTLE
(AP) — Nick Risinger has always gazed up at the sky. But last year the
amateur astronomer and photographer quit his day job as a Seattle
marketing director and lugged six synchronized cameras about 60,000
miles to capture an image of the entire night sky.
Risinger,
28, set up his rack of cameras in high-elevation locales in the Western
U.S. and South Africa, timing photo shoots around new moons when nights
were long and dark. He programmed his six cameras to track the stars as
they moved across the sky and simultaneously snapped thousands of
photos.
He
then stitched 37,440 exposures together into a spectacular, panoramic
survey sky that he posted online two weeks ago. The photo reveals a
360-degree view of the Milky Way, planets and stars in their true
natural colors. Viewers can zoom in on portions of the 5,000-megapixel
image to find Orion or the Large Magellanic Cloud.
“I
wanted to share what I thought was possible,” said Risinger, a
first-time astrophotographer. “We don’t see it like this. This is much
brighter. On a good night in Seattle, you’ll see 20 or 30 stars. This,
in its full size, you’ll see 20 to 30 million. Everything is amplified.”
Other
sky surveys have preceded this one, including the Digitized Sky Survey
and Google Sky. Many serve scientific purposes and were shot in red and
blue to measure the temperature of stars, Risinger said. He shot in a
third color, green, to give the photo added depth and richness, he said.
“What
a labor of love it is!” said Andrew Fraknoi, senior educator at the
Astronomical Society of the Pacific. “Professional astronomers are now
doing much deeper surveys of small regions of the sky, using big
telescopes. But every once in a while it’s nice to step back and have
such a beautiful photographic record of the whole sky.”
In this Monday, May 9, 2011 photo, Nick Risinger poses for a photo in Seattle with the rack of six synchronized astrophotography cameras he used to create the photograph on the wall behind him, which shows the entire night sky in a single composite image, made up of more than 37,000 exposures taken in different locations all over the world. Risinger traveled more than 60,000 miles by air and land and spent more than a year to produce the photo. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren) |
“This
is not a scientifically useful image. This is for educational and
artistic appreciation,” Risinger said, adding that he didn’t want to
make money off it. “It is for educational purposes. I want to develop
some tools for the classroom.”
To
capture the entire night sky in a year, Risinger plotted out an exact
schedule of images he needed from both the northern and southern
hemisphere. He divided the sky into 624 uniform sections and entered
those coordinates into the computer.
“The
sheer amount of work was mind-boggling,” he said at his apartment in
Seattle. “It’s not a wing-it kind of project. You have to plan how
you’re going to get the entire sky. And you do that by dividing it up
into pieces and knowing what time you need to collect those pieces
because as the Earth goes around the Sun, things come in and out of
view.”
In
March of last year, Risinger and his older brother, Erik, traveled to
the desert near Tonapah, Nev., and took the first photos of what
eventually would become his Photopic Sky Survey.
When
he realized the work was too monumental, Risinger quit his day job as a
marketing director of a countertop company to devote himself full-time
to the project. He also persuaded his retired father, Tom, who lives in
Gig Harbor, Wash., to join him.
In
the U.S., he and his dad would often drive all day and set up and take
photographs all night. They chased ideal windows of opportunity to catch
the night sky at its clearest.
In this 2010 photograph provided by Nick Risinger of Skysurvey.org, Risinger is shown in Colorado, setting up a rack of six synchronized cameras for a night of photographing the night sky. (AP Photo/Courtesy Nick Risinger, Skysurvey.org) |
Their
travels took them to dark places where light pollution was low and
higher altitudes where there was less water vapor — near the Chiricahua
Mountains in Arizona, near Fort Davis, Tex., and Lassen National Forest
in California. He found himself staking out stars in freezing
temperatures in Telluride, Colo., and amid stars in South Africa where
none of the constellations were recognizable to his northern
hemisphere-trained eyes.
Each
night, Risinger set the six cameras — high-end monochrome
astrophotography imagers equipped with different filters — to point in
the exact same spot and continuously feed his laptop with images. He
monitored the photographs in real-time and passed the dark hours eating
sunflower seeds. Meanwhile, his dad slept.
Back
in Seattle, Risinger began piecing the panoramic image together in
January. He used a computer software program to scan each frame,
recognize the pattern with a database of stars and then match them with
the other colors and frames. That got projected onto a sphere.
“Making
an atlas of the night sky is something that mostly professional
astronomers would have done in the past,” said Fraknoi, who is also
chairman of the astronomy department at Foothill College in Los Altos
Hills, Calif. “With new computer tools at our disposal, it’s remarkable
what amateur astronomers can discover.”
Risinger finished the project a couple weeks ago, and has been getting thousands of hits on his website.
“It
was always hard to describe what I was doing that would make sense to
people that aren’t familiar with astronomy. But once they see it, they
get it.”
SOURCE: The Associated Press
