How often do you get to interact with the universe? This 46 Gigapixel ‘panorama’ of the milky way, was made at the German university Ruhr-Universitat Bochum, and took half a decade to complete. .
Actually, this image of the Milky Way is so big that it had to be broken down into 268 sections, each photographed over a period of a several days and composed into a single image. Those 268 sections were then combined into an enormous 194 Gigabyte file which contains several “layers” of information. This interactive tool can be accessed here.
The huge photo revealed over 50,000 new objects with variable brightness, which is kinda impressive, even for the Milky Way.
Here is a quick show of scale, the image at the top of this post is occupying less than 1 tenth of a degree of the field of view the panorama contains.
[via cbsnews]
