The amazingly talented astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard has done it again! Check out this amazing 360° view of the entire sky:
[Click the picture to 2 π steradianate and get access to a zoomable, panable image.] There's so much going on here it's hard to know where to start. Basically, Stéphane wanted to get the darkest sky possible for this shot. So he went to the Atacama desert in Chile, not far from the Paranal observatory. At that latitude, and at that time of year, the Milky Way -- usually seen as a band of light across the sky -- circles the horizon! That glow you see around the picture is not from cities or anything else like that, it's from the galaxy itself. Since the Milky Way is so low in the sky, its soft light is minimized. He also took this picture at new Moon, so there was no ...
