The newly-released photographic mosaic of our Galaxy is the largest astronomical image ever created, according to a team of astronomers from Germany and Chile.
This small section of the Milky Way mosaic shows the star system Eta Carinae. Image credit: Lehrstuhl für Astrophysik / Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
The digital mosaic contains 46 billion pixels and is available on a web site named http://gds.astro.rub.de, which was started by Prof. Rolf Chini of the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) and his colleagues.
“The area that we observed was so large that we had to subdivide it into 268 sections,” Prof. Chini and co-authors explained.
The team used telescopes at RUB’s Cerro Armazones Observatory in Chile to acquire 268 individual images.
“We created a 194 Gigabyte file, into which images taken with different filters have been entered,” the scientists said.
“Using the online tool, any interested person can view the complete ribbon of the Milky Way at a glance, or zoom in and inspect specific areas,” they explained.
“An input window, which provides the position of the displayed image section, can be used to search for specific objects.”
“If the user types in ‘Eta Carinae,’ for example, the tool moves to the respective star; the search term ‘M8’ leads to the Lagoon Nebula.”
Prof Chini and co-authors reported their results in a pair of papers in the journal Astronomical Notes (Astronomische Nachrichten).
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