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!

Filed under Prevarication Tagged with , , ,

2 Responses to Oh my God, it’s full of stars

  1. gclayden says:
    30th March 2012 at 16:17

    I’d probably lose count after 500,000,000 and have to start all over again…..doh!

    Like

    Reply

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