We’ve featured astrophotographer Stéphane Guisard‘s beautiful time-lapse work capturing the stars once before when he put together the time-lapse of the comet Lovejoy rising above the Andes mountains. His most recent video, however, takes a much larger field of view, and teaches us a little bit about our place (or rather placement) in the Milky Way all at the same time. Read more…

On a mountaintop in Chile is the most powerful digital camera mankind has ever constructed. Called the Dark Energy Camera, the phone booth-sized device shoots 570-megapixel photographs using an array of 62 separate CCD sensors and a 13-foot light-gathering mirror. Planning and building the thing took 120 scientists from 23 international organizations a whopping 8 years.

This past week, the researchers behind the project announced the first fruits of their labor: massive photographs that show patches of the sky 20 times the size of the moon (as seen from Earth).
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This amazing photograph by Ricardo Mohr shows the volcano Puyehue-Cordón Caulle in southern Chile erupting this past June. After being submitted to National Geographic’s My Shot photo community, the photograph was selected as one of the magazine’s “Pictures We Love: Best of October.” You can download a high-res version to use as a wallpaper here.

Chile Ash Cloud (via Boing Boing via Laughing Squid)

Image credit: Photograph by Ricardo Mohr