Using a whopping nine-gigapixel image from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, an international team of astronomers has created a catalogue of more than 84 million stars in the central parts of the Milky Way. This gigantic dataset contains more than ten times more stars than previous studies and is a major step forward for the understanding of our home galaxy. The image gives viewers an incredible, zoomable view of the central part of our galaxy. It is so large that, if printed with the resolution of a typical book, it would be 9 metres long and 7 metres tall.
The release, images and videos are available on:
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1242/
Translations are available in: Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese/Brazil, Portuguese/Portugal, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Space Scoop - the children's version of this release is available at: http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1242/kids/
Kind regards,
The ESO Education and Public Outreach Department
24 October 2012
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17 October 2012: This exciting episode of the ESOcast gives viewers an exclusive backstage pass to see what went on behind the scenes while filming the ESO live webcast “A Day in the ...
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19 October 2012: A crew from the Dutch public broadcaster VPRO and the Dutch Research School for Astronomy (NOVA) visited the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory from 1–6 September 2012. The purpose ...
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