Oh my God, it’s full of stars
30th March 2012 2 Comments
About 1,000,000,000 of them in this amazing composite photograph of the Milky Way. Taking 10 years to make and using 2 telescopes (to get a view from North and South hemispheres) it combines the UKIDSS/GPS sky survey acquired by the UK Infrared Telescope in Hawaii with the VVV survey data acquired by the Vista telescope in Chile.
This zoomable image is truly magnificent; to get an idea of scale of the number of visible stars, if you count them at a rate of 1 per second it will take you well over 30 years to count them all.
Happy Counting!
I’d probably lose count after 500,000,000 and have to start all over again…..doh!
You would probably end up taking over 10 years doing that, rather than the one or two you first thought it would take 😉