sci-universe: Zooming Into The Largest Image of Space Ever…

Zooming Into The Largest Image of Space Ever Created
The recently published largest astronomical image, showing our galaxy with 46 billion pixels and a file size of 194 GB, is an endless treasure chest. So I made these gifs zooming into a couple of nebulas that caught my eye. In the beginning the stars look like grains of sand but here’s an example of what you can find.

For five years, the astronomers from the Ruhr University have been

monitoring our galaxy in the search of objects with variable brightness.

The massive Milky Way mosaic is stitched together of 268 images of the southern sky captured at their observatory in Chile.

The photos have

been taken with a narrowband filter that doesn’t let other colours through to allow the team to get a more accurate reading of variables; objects, which for example, include stars in front of which a planet is

passing.

So far, the Chair of Astrophysics’ team has discovered over 50,000 new variable objects that will among other things help astronomers in their search for planets outside of our solar system.

Here is the online tool the researchers of Ruhr University provided so everyone could explore the Milky Way (but be patient since it’s huge)

PS please don’t repost the gifs without credit, thanks!