Centralight

CMU Today Sky devotion After nearly two years and more than 26,000 miles, CMU physics professor Axel Mellinger has pieced together 3,000 individual photographs and transformed them into one panoramic image of the full night sky with the Milky Way galaxy at its center. He traveled to remote areas in South Africa, Texas and the Huron-Manistee National Forest in Michigan to fi nd locations dark enough to capture the images. Then Mellinger used a mathematical model to create an image 60 to 80 times larger than a typical digital picture. The high-resolution image makes it more useful for educational and scientifi c purposes because it allows viewers to see and zoom in on all elements of the sky at once. It provides a much wider fi eld of view than existing images such as those captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, which only display one element at a time. "The panorama that Axel created is astounding," says Bill Wren, an astronomer at the McDonald Observatory located at the University of Texas at Austin, who has followed Mellinger's work for several years. "There is nothing out there right now that is comparable to it, especially with this breadth and depth. It's just really an amazing piece of work." Mellinger plans to make his panorama available to planetariums around the world. • Olympic wisdom Olympian Sheila Taormina, the fi rst woman to compete in three diff erent sports in the Olympic Games, visited CMU last fall to pass along the gambari spirit. "Gambari is a Japanese word that means keep going, do not give up, keep fi ghting, fall down seven times, get up eight," Taormina said. Already an Olympic gold medalist in swimming (1996, 4x200m freestyle) and a two-time Olympian in triathlon (2000 and 2004), Taormina had set out to compete in the modern pentathlon in the 2008 Olympic Games, despite having no experience in three of the fi ve events. Sharing stories from the journey that took her from Livonia, Mich., where she was born, to Beijing, Taormina spoke of shattering paradigms – including the commonly held belief that, nearing 40, she was too old to learn a new sport and compete at an elite level – the frustrations and anxieties she faced, and the lessons she learned along the way. But most of all she inspired, encouraging the audience members to trust themselves and not let the "tyranny of the shoulds" – what anyone thinks they should do – stop them from following their hearts. "Be brave," she said. "I wish you the joyful pursuit of everything you have going on in your life." • centralight spring '10 3 PHOTO BY ROBERT BARCLAY PHOTO BY ROBERT BARCLAY

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