150 Gigapixel Sky Image Contains 1 Billion Stars

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).

Re:Oh my god

[Joce640k]

Question is ... is it an American 'billion' or the same 'billion' as the rest of the world?

Re:3D version?

[JTsyo]

Would you even be able to tell the difference between things lightyears away without having your two points of view much further apart that 2 sides of Earth orbit?

Re:Oh my god

[UnknowingFool]

[Carl Sagan voice]
Milliards and milliards of stars.

Doesn't have quite the same ring.

Re:Oh my god

[X0563511]

It would be nice if people would stop being stupid and we could actually say 10^12 in a news article and not get slack-jawed stares. That would solve a lot of this silly ambiguity.

Re:Oh my god

[tlhIngan]

the word "billion" in british english means 10^12 to a lot of people too - hence the comment i replied to. before i went into science it meant 10^12 to me, as well, but spend long enough in science and you begin to see just how few people are aware of that - and it seems to get fewer each year.

Or a little thinking (not too much) can realize that a million-million makes no sense in this context.

1-million-million is 1,000,000,000,000 (10^12).

This image is 150,000-million, or 150,000,000,000.

If 1 billion referred to was defined as million-million, it's easy to see that there would be more stars than pixels in the image by over 6 stars to 1 pixel.

OTOH, using it as meaning 10^9, it means there's 1 star for ever 150 pixels, which seems to make MUCH more sense.