A photograph of the entire Milky Way galaxy, made up of 234 separate photographs put together, contains about 20 million of the nearly 400 billion known stars.
A Finnish astrophotographer spent 12 years taking pictures of the sky part by part using photographic equipment available to ordinary people to put together a panorama of the Milky Way.
The photo has a total of 1.7 billion pixels. The photographer, J-P Metsavainio, said the entire photo consists of 234 separate photos put together, showing about 20 million of the nearly 400 billion known stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy.
Why did this photo take 12 years? In his blog post, Mesavanio explains that he divided the images into many detailed chunks that were photographed separately. Many of the photos he had previously published as separate works. The photos took a total of 1,250 hours to take over the course of 12 years.
Some of the objects were faint and took a long Time to expose, Mesavanio said, such as one supernova that took more than 60 hours to photograph.
In addition to the overall splendor, the photos include many views worth looking at, such as the California Nebula (named for its shape, which happens to resemble the appearance of California on the U.S. West Coast), the red and blue Pelican Nebula and the Wizard Nebula.
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