French Photographers Create Milky Way Panorama

French photographers have stitched together a series of images to create a 360 degree panoramic view of the Milky Way galaxy, according to Wired.

The project available from the European Southern Observatory lets you visit any part of the galaxy and can be viewed on-line HERE.

Serge Brunier and Frédéric Tapissier patched together 1,200 photos of the night sky to create the photo.

While many of the most stunning space images come from huge telescopes or Hubble, Brunier wanted to create photographs of space that were closer to the commonplace human experience of just going outside and looking at the sky.

“I wanted to show a sky that everyone can relate to — with its constellations, its thousands of stars, with names familiar since childhood, its myths shared by all civilizations since Homo became Sapiens,” Brunier said in a release. “The image was therefore made as man sees it, with a regular digital camera under the dark skies in the Atacama Desert and on La Palma.”

Each exposure was six minutes long, and the project extended over several months