Physicist makes high-res Milky Way photo

MOUNT PLEASANT, Mich., Oct. 29 (UPI) -- A U.S. physics professor says he has put together 3,000 individual photographs to produce a high-resolution panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy.

Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University said he spent 22 months and traveled more than 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan to produce the panoramic view.

"This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae," Mellinger said.

One of the many problems he said he 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 resolve the problem, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. That allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He said he then edited the varying background light in each photograph.

An interactive version of the panorama image can viewed at http://home.arcor.de/axel.mellinger/.

He describes the process of making the image in the November issue of the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.