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The Largest Astro Mosaic!

Mosaic Deep Sky
Deep Sky Mosaics •5 replies•450 views
Colin avatar
Colin avatar
This is a bit of shameless self promotion but I am about to start undtaking the largest astronomical photograph ever. In short, I am planning on creating a 1000 panel mosaic around the Galactic Central Bulge which will end up as a 65 billion pixel image. At ~1 terabyte in size, its one whopping huge image.

To help get it off of the ground I have started and Indiegogo campaign.
https://igg.me/at/GByiPWbyi2c

Time line is currently to begin photographing in mid May, telescope and camera for the project are on order and will hopefully be shipping within the next few weeks.

When deciding to make a big image, I figured I may as well go BIG and break all records. Wanting to share the worlds largest astronomical image everyone is up there with my reasons for doing this smile
Colin avatar
Colin avatar
Thanks for that Roberto. I am yet to find that the complexity increases as mosaics get larger. I use the same methodology whether it is a 2 panel, 10,20,30,80 or a 100 panel.

i haven't done anything larger than a 100 panel yet but I am yet to find anything other than an increase in time as they get larger.

if you're dealing with thousands of images, some of yours must be getting quite large!
Wei-Hao Wang avatar
Wei-Hao Wang avatar
Sounds great.  Looking forward to see your results, as well as the techniques developed in the project.
Well Written
Björn Hoffmann avatar
Björn Hoffmann avatar
Good luck! I will follow your progress!
I worked on a similar (but much smaller) project last year and I want to repeat it this year. I nearly became crazy during processing.. You need a lot of persistence! And of course ridiculous computing power.. ;)
Here is my project: http://www.astrobin.com/261676/
Supportive
Colin avatar
Colin avatar
Seeing that mosaic just makes me want to take mine larger!
Just had a fiddle in TSX, if I bump it up to 2000 panels it'll take me into the Southern Cross and a bit further out the other way too. Of course this gets to 131 gigapixels but would certainly look nice on a wall!

As you've mentioned, photographing the whole sky with a 135mm lens isn't plausible, probably less so at 600mm smile