The Grand Mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy II
This is the only photo in the World showing the Northern Milky Way so deep and detailed, now it's large than ever!
Click for a large image, 7000 x 1150 pixels
The reason I keep doing my slow work is an endless curiosity, I love to show how wonderful our world really is. That's how I feel at front of everything I'm able to see through my photography. This is my purpose as an artist. I have to fulfil the demands of my passion – and I have done so for about 25 years.
Photographed area of sky is showing a large part of Northern Milky Way in high resolution. Beside the size, it's very deep, meaning that it shows extremely dim and unimaged nebulae across the galaxy plane. One of the reasons for this massive panorama project was a fact, that there was no such an image anywhere in the world. I had personal need for the photo like this since I wanted to use it as a map to the new adventures.
Revealing the hidden beauty of our universe is my passion. I stand in rapt adoration before all that I see. When art meets science, the results can be quite mind-blowing.
Astronomical photography is a very time-consuming process. If I want to have a color image, I have to shoot each target least three times through a different filter to have all three-color channels needed for color image. Also, the exposure times can be very long, in my case even hundreds of hours for some very dim objects. An average exposure time is around 25 hours per image. Also everything has to be carefully pre planned.
I made imaging plans over ten years ago, I wrote first ideas about this imaging project to my little black Moleskin notebook. I was aware at the time, that it will take a decade to be finalized but it doesn't bother me since I love long projects, they are giving a purpose and the goal to my work as an artist.
I needed to develop many new working methods to be able to control this massive project. I needed to get them ready first since ones started, the project can't be changed anymore without canceling it. Everything needs to be spot on, the planning of composition and its relation to the Milky Way objects, many technical aspects, like how to handle a data from different optics with a different spatial resolution etc. I won't go very deep into technical details, since the complex technique needed is just a tool to make my art.
Step 3,
2019 -2021, SOLVING THE BIG PUZZLE
Finally at 2019, after so many years, I had enough material to start working with the final mosaic image. The work took about two years due to complex mosaic structure and massive amount of image material. I also needed to shoot lots of missing material for the mosaic at the same time.
I used the Cartes du Ciel, a star map software, for planning and a preliminary fit the individual frames.
AND FINALLY
At October 2021, after 12 years, 1500 hours of exposures and countless hours of work
The Grand Mosaic of the Milky Way Galaxy II
Getting to a last piece of the puzzle is always a thrilling process. Many of us know, how frustrating it can be to notice, that one piece is missing. That's happened to me too. I was sure that I shot the piece about three years ago but couldn't find it anywhere from my hard drives. As a result, I had to wait several extremely long weeks to be able to reshoot the missing piece to get this massive puzzle finalized.
It took nearly twelve years to collect enough data for this high resolution gigapixel class mosaic image of the Milky Way. Total exposure time used is around 1250 hours between 2009 and 2021.
" I can hear music in this composition, from the high sounds of sparcs and bubbles at left all the way to a deep and massive sounds at right."