I guess this can be described as the universe’s biggest selfie…

Over 4 years the Pan-STARRS1 (The Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) have been taking photos of the skies from its location on a desolated, dormant volcano in Maui, Hawaii. Those four years (and half a million exposures) of data collection resulted in a huge single image (and database) which is over two million gigabyte big.

In fact the image is so big, that if printed at full res, it would be 2.4 miles wide, and show about three billion stars. How’s that for a selfie?!

[Read More…]