[X] My Assistant

[dilo]

Four days ago, APOD published a portion of the "encompasing infrared view" of the plane of our Galaxy, based on more than 800,000 frames. The view is truly spectacular but, unfortunately, they published only images in low and full resolution: while the former aren't detailed enough to appreciate the tremendous details, the latter are really huge and hard to manipulate (each frame is a low-compression jpeg with 335 Mpixel/80MB size, for a total of more than 5 Gpixel!)
I tried to do something with just aquired quadcore desktop and, in fact, the 3 GB ram allowed me to upload images in PSP, reduce them to halfsize and stitch some of them togheter. My choice was to use the four-color composite version (3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns). This zoom sequence demonstrate the incredible amount of info in this survey:

upper image shows a 270° global view, obtained by joining the low-res pictures; then I progressively zoomed toward center, enlarging by 8 each time (zoomed portion is highlighted by rectangles). Final picture is half the full resolution and should be about 4° wide (almost 5"/pixel).
If I will find time, I will try to make a zoomed animation in the next days...
I would like to know if anyone made (or want to do) similar attempts, eventually using better SW...

Edit: sorry for partial edit with wrong image in my initial posts, I had some connection issues...