Yes, Rotunda Sing, a UVA tradition that brings together the University’s a cappella groups for a Lawn performance during the first week of fall semester, provided the soundtrack to Gilmore’s latest photo shoot on Grounds.
“This is kind of surreal,” Gilmore said from South Lawn as he peered into his camera’s viewfinder. Well behind him, the Flying Virginians covered The Who’s “I Can See for Miles” at the Rotunda’s base. A reverb was present.
The concert just happened to take place under clear skies, the conditions Gilmore, over the course of a couple weeks in August, had been waiting for to attempt his shoot.
The final product – as seen in the main photo of this story – proved Gilmore wasn’t distracted by the music, nor the students roaming the Lawn (he reported no streakers, despite being out there from 8 p.m. to midnight).
He set out to capture the Milky Way’s galactic center – the star-crowded middle of our home galaxy – over an iconic UVA building, and he did just that, said Steven Majewski, an astronomy professor at the University whose research includes galactic structure and kinematics, and especially the stellar populations and evolution of the Milky Way.
“I love this image because it is an intriguing representation of our place in the cosmos,” Majewski said. “Old Cabell Hall, a familiar local center of human thought, is rendered against the starry center of our vast, home galaxy, the Milky Way.
“One wonders how many other centers of consciousness and thought may lie among the hundreds of billions of other star systems in our galaxy.”

The image of Old Cabell Hall under the Milky Way bookends nicely with this breathtaking framing of the Rotunda under the Heart and Soul Nebulae, which Gilmore put together last year. (Photo by Brennan Gilmore)
Gilmore, who graduated from the University in 2001 with an international relations and affairs degree, was first introduced to the UVA Today audience last year with a story detailing how he produced an image that featured the Rotunda below the Heart and Soul Nebulae.
(That story was among UVA Today’s most read in 2021, drawing more than 42,000 views.)
The process to create a second cosmic Lawn image was similar to Gilmore’s first attempt. He arrived on Grounds heavily laden with equipment – a couple tripods, a couple cameras, a few different filters, a telescope, an equatorial mount, a lens warmer, a laptop and a phone loaded with specific applications to track the sky.
UVA Today tagged along for much of Gilmore’s shoot, which was jump-started by a key positioning of his mount – or “star tacker,” as he called it.
“Because I'm taking hour-long exposures, if I open the shutter for a long time, without turning the camera with the rotation of the Earth, the stars will appear as just streaks,” Gilmore said. “So to keep the stars sharp, this thing has fine gears in it, which will turn at what they call ‘the sidereal rate,’ which is the same speed as the rotation of the Earth, to compensate for it.”
Gilmore, nodding to another piece of equipment, then took things a step further.
“This is actually a small telescope next to the camera I’m using,” he said. “I’m going to hook it up to a computer to find a star near where I’m shooting and then send commands to this box to keep that star right in the crosshairs over several minutes so that everything is very, very sharply focused.”
Gilmore used a 35-millimeter lens for a combined 117 shots of the sky and Old Cabell Hall. He then digitally stitched them together to create the mosaic. Using a tool called “dynamic background extraction” through the PixInsight computer program, he was able to subtract the sky pollution caused by the surrounding city lights and essentially pull the Milky Way more into focus.