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Hawaii News

Stellar view from Maui’s top tapped for best star map yet

  • DANNY FARROW / PAN-STARRS1 SCIENCE CONSORTIUM AND MAX PLANCK INSTITUTE FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL PHYSICS

    This compressed view of the entire sky visible from Hawaii by the Pan-STARRS Observatory is the result of a half-million exposures, each about 45 seconds in length, taken over a period of four years. The shape comes from making a map of the celestial sphere, like a map of Earth, but leaving out the southern quarter. The disk of the Milky Way looks like a yellow arc, and the dust lanes show up as reddish-brown filaments. The background is made up of billions of faint stars and galaxies. If printed at full resolution, the image would be 1.5 miles long.

  • COURTESY ROB RATKOWSKI

    The Pan-STARRS Observatory on Haleakala, Maui, opens at sunset to begin a night of mapping the sky.

For four years the world’s largest digital camera has been quietly snapping pictures of the nighttime sky above Maui, capturing images of all the stars, planets, galaxies and other celestial bodies above three-quarters of Earth. Read more

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