Ever since I found out about NASA's
Astronomy Picture of the Day, I've visited it daily and saved any images that particularly struck my fancy. After several years of that, I had built up over a thousand images with no real purpose in mind other than data hoarding. I wanted to have some space images on my wall, but most of them were too low-resolution to print well -- either the print resolution would be too low to look good, or the printing would be too small. The obvious answer (only took me a few months to come to!) is to make a collage.
Insert a few days of sorting through and making short lists and then short lists of the short lists, banging together scripts to download copyright information, toying with programmatically tiling the images together, and giving up on that and figuring out a good layout manually. The plan was to cover a serious amount of wallspace, so obviously trying to use a traditional image editor with my computer's puny 2GB of RAM was out of the question. I turned to Perl and ImageMagick to composite the different images together. Then I went
through several iterations. Ultimately I used
the Orion nebula as a backdrop, giving me a comfortable 18000x18000 pixels to play in (the previous background was
Galaxy M81, even bigger but not as visually interesting).
Today I sent a 418MB TIFF file based on
this smaller version off to the printers to get applied to 25 square feet of canvas. I'm going to figure out how to properly mount it when it arrives. In the meantime, does anyone else have any use for the thing? All of the images are public domain, so technically I could do whatever I want with it. Or you could. I was thinking of putting together a key and then making a torrent out of it, but there's no point unless someone else would download it.
Much love to NASA and everyone else keeping an eye on the cosmos. There's so much beauty out there.
