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There Are 84 Million Stars in This Nine Gigapixel Picture

The mighty VISTA infrared telscope has captured an image of unfathomable properties. The beast of an image, weighing in at nine gigapixels (9,000 megapixels, which would print to about 23 x 30 feet) is "zoomable":http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso...

Looking up into the dark autumn sky in New York City, I’m still dumbfounded on the nights that I’m able to spot more than a dozen stars. The city’s light pollution is actually so great here that when I visit rural places I’m kept up at night by a sort of analog version of the internet: stargazing. But now it seems a single photograph could contain more stars than a night in the countryside ever could.

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At the European Southern Observatory’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, site of the VLT (Very Large Telescope) array, the VISTA telescope (Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy) has captured a picture of unprecedented properties. The beast of an image, weighing in at nine-gigapixels (9,000 megapixels, which would print to about 23 × 30 feet) is now available in an interactive, zoomable format via ESO’s website.

VISTA, the eye behind the image

When you first open the image format you will probably have to wait a little while for the picture to load. If you’re only getting a white screen at first, just bear with it. A group of buttons at the bottom of the page allow for scrolling, zooming in and out. When you zoom into a region of the gargantuan image, it might look unbearably fuzzy. (Still—you might need to let it load after shifting levels of magnification.) If you want the full Ken Burns effect, use the arrow keys on your keyboard for scrolling: Use the shift key for zooming and the command key for zooming out.

Google Maps view of Paranal Observatory where the big picture was taken

From the photograph, scientists have created the largest dataset of stars from one source than has ever been compiled. In the image containing 173 million objects, the research has counted 84 million stars, 10 times as many as have been counted in previous reports.

Roberto Saito and Dante Minniti, co-authors of the gigantic star-indexing project explain that in the proces of viewing the vast middle section—called the bulge—of the Milky Way, we’re able to learn more about the origins and evolution of our galaxy. The team is focused on measuring infrared light shooting out of the bulge, a technique used to avoid dust, which Minniti explained would obscure our view in regular lighting.