Astronomers create 46-gigapixel panorama of the Milky Way

Astronomers from the Ruhr University Bochum have compiled a 46-gigapixel panorama of the Milky Way. They used footage that was made over the past five years. The final file is 194GB in size.

According to the makers, the panorama is the largest image of space ever created, which can be viewed in the browser with an interactive tool. It is possible to enter the names of stars or nebulae in the coordinates box, the panorama will then automatically zoom in on the relevant objects. Loading of the zoomed images does not seem to work properly at the time of writing, the site may be overloaded.

For five years, the researchers, led by Prof. dr. Rolf Chini, in the Milky Way to objects of variable brightness. For example, these could be stars that a planet passes in front of. To find such objects, the team pointed the telescopes at the University of Bochum, located at the observatory in Chile’s Atacama Desert, at the southern sky.

The area the astronomers observed was divided into 268 sections. Each section was photographed at an interval of several days so that by comparing the images the objects with variable brightness became visible. In total, the researchers discovered more than 50,000 new objects. All the footage was then used to create the large panorama. After a few weeks of calculation, this resulted in a file of 194 gigabytes, an image consisting of a total of 46 billion pixels.

In 2014, a 20-gigapixel image of the Milky Way was assembled. Two million infrared photos from the Glimpse project were used for this panorama.