KSLA News 12 Shreveport, Louisiana |26,000-mile journey yields digital view of sky
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Associated Press - November 16, 2009 7:55 AM ET
MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich. (AP) - A Michigan scientist has finished a 2-year, 26,000-mile mission to assemble a panoramic photo image of the night sky.
Central Michigan University physicist Axel Mellinger pieced together 3,000 individual photos to create the image of the night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy at the center.
Bill Wren, who's an astronomer at the University of Texas's McDonald Observatory, says the panorama is astounding.
The spread of artificial lighting forced Mellinger to trek to South Africa, Texas and the Huron-Manistee National Forest in Michigan to find locations dark enough to capture the images.
Mellinger developed and scanned the photos, then spent hundreds of hours on the computer creating a high-resolution digital image.
Mellinger hopes to make his panorama available to planetariums worldwide.
On the Net:
http://www.news.cmich.edu/2009/11/cmu-professor-creates-panorami
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