Piecing together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the forthcoming issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger's website.

"This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, "the real work started," Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. 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.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

"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.

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.

[University of Chicago via Axel Mellinger via Examiner via io9]

The result is a stunning composite of 83 different shots of this incredible tree. Look for a huge foldout of the image in the October issue of National Geographic, and here's a video of Nichols talking about the process of capturing the image.

[NPR via Hack-a-Day via Make]

Like the original Epic, it transforms the art of panorama into a machine process, automatically tilting and moving your camera to capture hundreds (or however many) photos of the large-scale scene you want to capture. It then downloads all of those photos from your camera and stitches them together with its proprietary software to create ginormous photos with thousands of megapixels, like this.

It has a bunch of smaller tweaks to the original as well, like the ability to take nine shots in the same position before moving, which Charlie notes means you can shoot high-dynamic range photos panoramas with the Epic 100, provided you've got the memory card space and the battery juice. Speaking of, it apparently still uses six AA batteries, meaning the original Epic's Achilles' heel Mark found is intact—actually, since it's moving a heavier camera and now has a backlit LCD, it seems like it could be worse. Not bad for $450, still.

If you're still not satisfied with the size of this thing, don't worry—GigaPan promises at the bottom of the page that they're working on the GigaPan DSLR imager. Could you imagine an uberpanorama of a city skyline at night composed with a 5D Mark II or Nikon D700? Hold on, I think I need to change my pants. [GigaPan Gadget Lab]

You can also fit the D3 sensor cassette onto other Seitz cameras, like the Seitz 6x17 Digital Panorama Camera. All this technology goes to make sure the next time you're apartment shopping on the web, you can actually feel like you're there in some dude's living room. – Jason Chen

Press Release [Seitz via Camborg]

How to Build a Panoramic Tripod Head for $10 [Via Lifehacker]

Product Page [Seitz via TheInquirer]