You must think that I’m somehow obsessed with astrophotography. The truth is that I’ve never had a go at it, but I do find it fascinating and I adore star-gazing. This means I did let out a small ‘Squee!’ when I saw that the largest ever colour image of the whole sky has just been released. It comprises seven million images, each one made of 125 million pixels. That’s a lot of pixels. (More than a trillion, in fact.)
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been compiling data using a now-retired telescope at Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico since 1998. This week, they released the humungous picture at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
The image provides astronomers and astrophysicists with massive amounts of information to explore everything from yawning black holes to the tiniest stars.
To have a look at more images from the project, take a wander over here, whilst there’s a visualisation of it all on YouTube.