Amateur photographer stitches together 110 images of the Milky Way to reveal awesome beauty of our galaxy
Snapper combines dozens of night sky pictures to create a beautiful image showing some of the galaxy's 100 billion stars
AN amateur astronomer has painstakingly stitched together 110 shots of the night sky to make these incredibly detailed panoramas of the Milky Way.
Samir Samirovich, from the city of Syzran in south-western Russia's Samara Oblast region, climbed up into the mountains to capture the images away from urban light pollution.
He travelled into the hills of the more remote Chekalino area to take the photographs using his Nikon D5200 camera with a Nikkor 50mm lens.
The exposure for each frame was six seconds and the shooting took almost the whole night, but the most painstaking part was still ahead.
Samirovich spent more than seven hours knitting the photographs together to create the combined photograph, which he then shared on social media.
At the same time, the snapper was also taking photographs of the Andromeda galaxy and the Dumbbell Nebula through his telescope.
The Milky Way, the galaxy that contains our Solar System, was given its name way back in the mists of time - before we knew it was made of billions of stars.
The Andromeda Galaxy is a spiral galaxy about 2.5 million light years from Earth and the nearest major galaxy to the Milky Way.
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The Dumbbell Nebula is a planetary nebula in the constellation Vulpecula, at a distance of about 1,360 light-years from Earth.
It is a popular observing target for amateur astronomers.
Syzran is the third largest city in Samara Oblast and is located on the banks of the Volga River's Saratov Reservoir.
Last year, astronomers used more than 10 billion pieces of data to create a map of the Milky Way.
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