Largest Image of the Sky

Astronomers using the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey have pieced together the largest single image of the sky. The image covers and is built up from 7 million images each containing 125 million pixels.

The region of sky covered is similar to that contained in the standard Palomar survey completed in 1958. The original Palomar survey was captured on photographic plates using a 48-inch telescope. By contrast the Sloan survey data was captured using a 138 mega-pixel camera attached to a 2.5 m telescope.

The result - 10 times the number of objects in the image and totaling around half a billion objects such as galaxies, stars and nebulae.

The full press release and images can be found on the SDSS-III survey website.