German astronomers have created the largest astronomical photograph of our Milky Way ever taken, with a resolution of 46 gigapixels and which took 5 years to produce.
Last year, NASA released a 20- gigapixel , made up of over 2 million infrared images. In January, NASA also released a 1.5-gigapixel image of the Andromeda Galaxy. But it seems someone wanted to compete with it.
Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum began creating the massive photo half a decade ago while searching for objects in space that changed their brightness over time. After dividing a section of the southern sky into 268 different sections, the scientists spent days creating ultra-high-resolution images from telescopes at the Cerro Armazones observatory in Chile.
After all the sections had been photographed, the team “stitched” together these 268 giant photos into a super-giant photo with a 46-gigapixel resolution and a size of only 194 gigabytes!!!.
The photo is so large that you'll need to use this interactive, online viewerto view it properly. Again, you'll need to be patient as it downloads slowly (depending on your connection speed) as you zoom in on areas of interest. At first, it looks like a jagged panorama, but try zooming in and you'll see why it's a total of 194 GB.
Researchers say they discovered over 50,000 variable stars during the assembly of the photograph.
