I’ve seen my fair share of stellar Milky Way images over the last couple of years. But Finnish visual artist and astrophotographer J-P Metsavainio has raised the bar. He created a high-resolution gigapixel class mosaic image of the Milky Way that took nearly twelve years to create. He used around 1250 hours of exposure between 2009 and 2021 to create enough data for this photo. And although it was extremely labor-intensive, it was well worth it!
J-P spent so much time taking the shots for this composite for several reasons. First, of course, it’s the size of the finished piece. The final image is about 100,000 pixels wide, consisting of 234 individual mosaic panels stitched together, and in a whopping 1.7 gigapixels resolution. Another reason is that each of the images is very deep. Also, J-P shot most of the mosaic frames as individual compositions and published them as independent artworks. “That lead to a kind of complex image set which is partly overlapping with lots of unimaged areas between and around frames,” he explains in a blog post. “I have shot the missing data now and then during the years and last year I was able to publish many sub mosaic images as I got them ready first.”
The final image captures the Milky Way area between constellations Taurus and Cygnus. J-P says that there was not much tweaking necessary between the mosaic frames because his work is very constant. The overall exposure time was 1,250 hours, but not all frames took the exact same time to expose. Some required more, some less, but they all provided J-P with a uniform mosaic in the end.
The photographer also shares some technical information about his gear and process. He took the shots from his observatory in Oulu, Finland, but he used different optical configurations over the years. To stitch all his images together, J-P used Photoshop. He matched separate panels by using stars as an indicator and added just a bit of basic tweaks like levels, curves, and color balance. Since he used lots of longer focal length sub-frames in his mosaic to boost, he had to develop a new method to match them with shorter focal length shots. Take a look at more photos below and some details of the mosaic. Make sure to visit J-P’s website to see the full-size image, zoom in and explore it, you’ll love it. For more of his work, follow him on Facebook and Twitter, and you can also order his prints here.
