Central Michigan University

Friday, November 6, 2009

CMU professor creates panoramic view of the night sky

Axel Mellinger, a physics professor at CMU, points out a dust cloud located within the Milky Way on a digital reflection of the sky panorama he created.

Photo by Robert Barclay
CMU University Communications

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Tracy Burton
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After nearly two years and more than 26,000 miles, a Central Michigan University physics professor has pieced together 3,000 individual photographs and transformed them into one panoramic image of the full night sky with the Milky Way galaxy at its center.

Because of the limiting effect of artificial lighting in viewing the night sky, Axel Mellinger traveled to remote areas in South Africa, Texas and the Huron-Manistee National Forest in Michigan to find locations dark enough to capture the images he needed utilizing a specialized camera.

"My hope is that people, especially children, will become more aware of the beauty of the night sky and that it is something that we should protect," said Mellinger, who has been studying the sky since he was 12. "My image allows them to see and appreciate all of this."

After developing and scanning the photographs, Mellinger spent hundreds of hours at his computer using a mathematical model to create an image 60 to 80 times larger than a typical digital picture. The high-resolution image makes it more useful for educational and scientific purposes because it allows viewers to see and zoom in on all elements of the sky at once. It provides a much wider field of view than existing images such as those captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, which only display one element at a time.

"The image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can even see, and hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae together all at once," Mellinger said.

The fact that you can maintain this level of detail as you zoom in and out on the image means everything for study and research purposes, said Bill Wren, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory located at the University of Texas at Austin.

"The panorama that Axel created is astounding," said Wren, who has followed Mellinger's work for several years. "There is nothing out there right now that is comparable to it, especially with this breadth and depth. It's just really an amazing piece of work."

Mellinger plans to make his panorama available to planetariums around the world. He recently presented it at the Great Lakes Planetarium Association's conference, an event that drew astronomers from 20 states and four different countries to the Delta College Planetarium and Learning Center in Bay City.

"I set out to create this image because I wanted to provide a unique view of the night sky around us," Mellinger said. "Many people unfortunately no longer can see the fainter stars of the night sky because of all of the artificial light pollution."