Milky Way Panorama 2.0

Science | Fri, Oct 30, 2009 at 2:05:21 pm PDT

Astrophotographer Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University has created a new panoramic image of the Milky Way galaxy. You may have seen version 1.0 of Mellinger’s panorama; it’s even for sale as a poster at Amazon.

Version 2.0 is an order of magnitude more detailed. It was assembled from more than 3,000 individual images of 70 star fields taken with a special large format CCD camera in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. And there’s a very cool zoomable Mercator projection, that really gives a sense of the incredible vastness of our tiny little corner of the universe. (Click the image to go to the zoomable page.)