Quote:Risinger ended up quitting his job and, with the aid of his father and brother, traveled 60,000 miles with his unique photography setup. It consisted of six Finger Lakes ML-8300 monochrome cameras with 85-mm f/2.8 lenses bolted onto a Takahashi EM-11 Temma 2 mount. To ensure complete coverage, Risinger subdivided the sky into 624 fields, each just 12° across. He estimates that he's captured some 20 million stars in all.

Quote:To capture the entire night sky in a year, Risinger plotted out an exact schedule of images he needed from both the northern and southern hemisphere. He divided the sky into 624 uniform sections and entered those coordinates into the computer.

“The sheer amount of work was mind-boggling,” he said at his apartment in Seattle. “It’s not a wing-it kind of project. You have to plan how you’re going to get the entire sky. And you do that by dividing it up into pieces and knowing what time you need to collect those pieces because as the Earth goes around the Sun, things come in and out of view.”