A project that took place over the course of several months and many many many shots, each taken at 6-minute exposures.

Working in the dark, dry highlands of Chile with a Nikon D3 digital camera (50 mm lens open at f5.6), Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky into the composite that you see above.


While many of the most stunning space images come from huge telescopes or Hubble, Brunier wanted to create photographs of space that were closer to the commonplace human experience of just going outside and looking at the sky.


“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to — with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood, its myths shared by all civilizations since Homo became Sapiens,” Brunier said in a release. “The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera under the dark skies in the Atacama Desert and on La Palma.”

[Wired]

The Hubble repairs have been a success and the first images to come forth are.. spectacular. Truly amazing to have these highly-detailed images from space. And hey, if you don’t care, at least you have a few cool new wallpaper images you can put up. Win/win.

“This marks a new beginning for Hubble,” said Ed Weiler, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. “The telescope was given an extreme makeover and now is significantly more powerful than ever, well-equipped to last into the next decade.”

For more info and full-scale images go to Nasa’s site on the rejuvenated Hubble.