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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).

4 of 126 comments (clear)

  1. Oh my god by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    It's full of stars!

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

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

  2. Daytime? by Anne_Nonymous · · Score: 5, Funny

    Now if we could just get a 150,000 megapixel image of the daytime sky, we wouldn't have to go outside at all.

  3. 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