A 46 Billion Pixel Image Of The Milky Way – Largest Ever Created

MessageToEagle.com – Astronomers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany have compiled the largest astronomical image to date. This amazing and comprehensive picture is composed of the 268 individual images captured over the past five years.

The picture spans 46 billion pixels and makes up the photo of the Milky Way. The images were recorded at the Bochum university observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

You can use an online tool –  http://gds.astro.rub.de/  in order to view it.

The image contains data gathered in astronomical observations over a period of five years.

During the five-year observation period at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum in Germany, the astronomers, lead by professor Rolf Chini, have been monitoring our Galaxy in the search of objects with variable brightness.

Those objects may, for example, include stars in front of which a planet is passing, or multiple systems where stars orbit each other and which obscure each other every now and then. More than 50,000 new variable objects – never recorded earlier have been discovered by the researchers so far.

The astronomers photographed each section in intervals of several days and assembled the individual images of the 268 sections into one comprehensive image. Following a calculation period of several weeks, they created a 194 Gigabyte file, into which images taken with different filters have been entered.

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. 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 c

MessageToEagle.com

source: Ruhr Universitär Bochum

Hackstein et al. (2015): The Bochum Survey of the Southern Galactic Disk: II. Follow-up measurements and multi-filter photometry for 1323 square degrees monitored in 2010 – 2015, Astronomical Notes, DOI: 10.1002/asna.201512195

M. Haas, M. Hackstein, M. Ramolla, H. Drass, R. Watermann, R. Lemke, R. Chini (2012): The Bochum survey of the southern Galactic disk: I. Survey design and first results on 50 square degrees monitored in 2011, Astronomical Notes, DOI: 10.1002/asna.201211717