150 Gigapixel Sky Image Contains 1 Billion Stars 126
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).
That's Big! (Score:4, Interesting)
Assuming 8 bits per pixel, a 150,000,000,000 pixel image would be 419GB.
Re:Where can I download this? (Score:5, 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.
Re:Oh my god (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
And that's only this galaxy (Score:2, Interesting)
There are likely as many galaxies in the observable universe as there are stars in this galaxy.
Re:That's Big! (Score:5, Interesting)
-> curl -I http://djer.roe.ac.uk/vsa/vvv/v5.tif [roe.ac.uk]
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
Re:Oh my god (Score:5, Interesting)
Doughnut Stars (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 [roe.ac.uk]
Black dot in the center of stars? (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?
A sense of scale (Score:4, 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.