If you haven’t seen the Milky way with your own eyes, it’s shrink factor is unreal. I’ve seen lots of panoramas and kind of saw dustiness in the sky, but I’ll never forget the shock of the first time I could identify elements. I had a wide angle camera and was trying to get into astrophotography. I took just one, short, high ISO shot. Surprise to me, I got it. I caught the Milky way and could see some structures in the pic, such as the dark horse nebula (which I prefer to call the slug head). And then I looked up and the scene hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s huge. Mathematically it makes sense, it’s all around us and panoramas use 90+° lenses, so of course a pano on the horizon is going to be looking straight up, too. But none of that logic applied until I saw it, wrapped overhead.
If you haven’t seen the Milky way with your own eyes, it’s shrink factor is unreal. I’ve seen lots of panoramas and kind of saw dustiness in the sky, but I’ll never forget the shock of the first time I could identify elements. I had a wide angle camera and was trying to get into astrophotography. I took just one, short, high ISO shot. Surprise to me, I got it. I caught the Milky way and could see some structures in the pic, such as the dark horse nebula (which I prefer to call the slug head). And then I looked up and the scene hit me like a ton of bricks. It’s huge. Mathematically it makes sense, it’s all around us and panoramas use 90+° lenses, so of course a pano on the horizon is going to be looking straight up, too. But none of that logic applied until I saw it, wrapped overhead.
We are tiny.