Explore the Milky Way at 46 billion pixels
@...@ There is a whole lot of space out there beyond the Kármán line, and a lot of telescopes taking photos day after day and year after year// While we do get to see the most gorgeous of these images, showing interesting nebulas and other cosmic features, a great many ©more go unknown and unremarked beyond the research sphere//
@...@ But that doesn*t mean they*re useless// Far from it// For example, photographs taken by the Ruhr University Bochum*s observatory in Chile*s Atacama Desert have ©been the subject of intense scrutiny for the past five years under the leadership of Rolf Chini// The team has been scouring the Milky Way galaxy looking for objects of variable brightness that glow and dim//
@...@ They have been looking at a section of the southern sky so large ©that it needed to be divided into 268 sections, with each section photographed in intervals of several days// It is these 268 sections of photos that the team has stitched together into a massive mosaic of the Milky Way// At 46 billion pixels and a file size of 194 GB, it*s the largest image of space ever created//