Nick Risinger - a Seattle-based marketing director by day, Risinger began his photon-driven quest by asking the simple question, "What do you see at night?" <br><br>Now he knows, having captured the entire celestial sphere in a way that attempts to convey the night sky's grandeur at scales big and small. His <a href="http://skysurvey.org/" target="new_window">Photopic Sky Survey</a> was a mind-boggling undertaking: 37,440 digital exposures, taken over the course of a year from sites in North America and South Africa, that he painstakingly stitched together to create a single, 5-gigapixel image.<br><br>It wasn't easy. Risinger ended up quitting his job and, with the aid of his father and brother, traveled 60,000 miles with his unique photography setup. It consisted of six Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome cameras with 85-mm f/2.8 lenses bolted onto a Takahashi EM-11 Temma 2 mount. To ensure complete coverage, Risinger subdivided the sky into 624 fields, each just 12° across. He estimates that he's captured some 20 million stars in all.<br><br><!--
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<img src="http://media.skyandtelescope.com/images/Nick_Risinger.jpg" alt="Nick Risinger in Colorado" title="Nick Risinger in Colorado" width="200" border="0" height="286"> <div class="caption">Nick Risinger prepares to photograph the night sky from a site in Colorado. On this particular night, the temperature dropped to -6°F (-21°C).</div> <div class="caption"><i>Nick Risinger</i></div> </div>
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-->This isn't the most comprehensive all-sky photography undertaken (the <a href="http://archive.stsci.edu/cgi-bin/dss_form" target="new_window">Digitized Sky Survey</a>, released in 1994, wins that prize). So don't expect any scientific breakthroughs from it.<br><br>Nor is this the first all-sky effort by an amateur: among others, there's <a href="http://www.cloudynights.com/documents/desktop.pdf" target="new_window">Desktop Universe</a>, completed in 2002 and later incorporated into the popular <em>Starry Night</em> software, and Axel Mellinger's two efforts (one accomplished <a href="http://home.arcor-online.de/axel.mellinger/mwpan_old.html" target="new_window">on film</a>, another wholly <a href="http://home.arcor-online.de/axel.mellinger/mwpan_new.html" target="new_window">digital</a>).<br><br>But what sets Risinger's work apart is its depth — revealing, he explains, "glowing factories of newborn [stars] and a rich tapestry of dust all floating on a stage of unimaginable proportions." It affords you the chance to float leisurely across the sky at your leisure and then stop and zoom in for some in-depth sightseeing.°
