http://skysurvey.org/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;Amateur astronomer Nick Risinger travelled more than 96,000 kilometres and snapped 37,440 exposures to create this detailed portrait of the entire night sky. The 5000-megapixel image provides a 360-degree interactive view of the Milky Way and more than 20 million stars.
Risinger quit his job in marketing to complete the monumental undertaking. His retired father accompanied him as he roamed remote landscapes in the American West and South Africa on a quest to capture the cosmos. Risinger divided the sky into 624 regions, then snapped images from both hemispheres, planning his shoots to take place when the moon was new and the sky dark. To keep the images sharp, he mounted six cameras on a tripod that moved in sync with the Earth's rotation, taking 60 exposures of each region of the sky.
In January, Risinger began piecing all this data together using software to map the stars and match the different frames. He recently posted the complete Photopic Sky Survey online
