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150 Gigapixel Sky Image Contains 1 Billion Stars

Posted by Unknown on from the scientists-declare-universe-contains-lots-of-stuff dept.

The Bad Astronomer writes "Astronomers have used two big telescopes to create an infrared survey of the Milky Way that is the largest of its kind: the resulting image has an incredible 150,000 megapixels containing over a billion stars. Something that large is difficult to use, so they also made a pan-and-zoom version online which should keep you occupied for quite some time. These data will be used to better understand star formation in our Milky Way, and how far more distant galaxies and quasars behave." The interactive image is powered by IIPImage which happens to be Free Software and is cool in its own right (right click the image to get help — it has a full set of keybindings for navigation).

9 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. That's Big! by Hatta · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Assuming 8 bits per pixel, a 150,000,000,000 pixel image would be 419GB.

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    1. Re:That's Big! by SureshotM6 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      The source is a 91.6GB TIFF file. The filename on the server is in some of the CGI requests.

      -> curl -I http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/v5.tif
      HTTP/1.1 200 OK
      Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2012 15:42:27 GMT
      Server: Apache/2.2.21 (Debian)
      Last-Modified: Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:13:29 GMT
      ETag: "f61e88-16e808414a-4bbff6bf3ed80"
      Accept-Ranges: bytes
      Content-Type: image/tiff
      Content-Length: 98382135626
      Proxy-Connection: Keep-Alive
      Connection: Keep-Alive

  2. Re:Where can I download this? by networkBoy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Was just looking at that and thinking...
    How much would it cost to get a photo quality print made that is 9 feet tall and long enough to wrap around my entire den at my house? That would be the best ever wallpaper.

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  3. Re:Oh my god by jellomizer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Perhaps a silly question... Why do a lot of the stars when you zoom in you get a black dot in the middle...
    I mean if they were a planet. 1. so many of them shouldn't be almost directly in the middle. 2. Those planets would be HUGE (or a rogue planet eclipsing the star (still why then are all of them in the center) So that seems unlikely.

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  4. And that's only this galaxy by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There are likely as many galaxies in the observable universe as there are stars in this galaxy.

  5. Re:Oh my god by jcgam69 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The sensor is supersaturated due to the star's brightness.

  6. Doughnut Stars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why do some of the stars look like they've got holes in them?
    http://djer.roe.ac.uk/fcgi-bin/iipsrv.fcgi?FIF=/data/vsa/vvv/v5.tif&CNT=1&SDS=0,90&JTL=11,86696

  7. Black dot in the center of stars? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does anyone know why almost all stars (it can be seen easier in big ones) have a black dot in the middle?

  8. A sense of scale by adenied · · Score: 3, Interesting

    A billion stars seems like a lot but general consensus is that the Milky Way alone has 300 +/- 100 billion stars. So at best this is like 0.5% of the galaxy. I just read about the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey looking at 300,000 galaxies and planning on hitting 1,000,000 eventually. The number of stars out there is truly mind blowing for us puny humans. It's really impressive if you stop to think about it.