I drove out to the back country area above Hanmer Springs on the South Island of New Zealand to capture this 360 degree seamless pano of the night sky.
There’s quite a lot going on with this image – you have the Milky Way which can be seen arching over the landscape in the right of frame, and below that you can see a natural phenomena know as gravity waves. The glow in the centre of frame is from the lights of Christchurch 130km away, and to the left of that are the Magellanic Clouds, which are a duo of irregular dwarf galaxies visible only from the Southern Hemisphere. The faint triangular glow to the far left of frame is the Zodiacal Light, which is caused by sunlight scattered by space dust in the zodiacal cloud, and in this case, is seen just before morning twilight.
For the tech buffs out there, this image is a 218 megapixel image made up of a stitch of 28 individual images, which were shot on a Gigapan Epic Pro. The images were shot 4 rows vertically by 7 columns horizontally, each on a 24mm lens with an exposure of a 25 second shutter at f/2.8 with an ISO 6400. The whole pano took a total of 14 minutes to shoot with all the images.
copyright 2014 | Mark Gee | theartofnight.com
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