Gigagalaxy Zoom

Seems that the internet keeps coming up with more and more cool sites that once you get into them, you can end up spending hours there. The latest of these time-sucking beasts is a new site called "Gigagalaxy Zoom". This is an 800 million pixel image of the night sky with the Milky Way through the middle. The photo is composed of about 120 hours of images at 6 minutes each and assembled into a large image. Here is a quote from the site that describes it:

The painstaking production of this image came about as a collaboration between the renowned French writer and astrophotographer Serge Brunier, his fellow Frenchman Frédéric Tapissier, and ESO staff. Brunier spent several weeks during the period between August 2008 and February 2009 capturing the sky, mostly from ESO observatories at La Silla and Paranal in Chile. In order to cover the full Milky Way, Brunier also made a weeklong trip to La Palma, one of the Canary Islands, to photograph the northern skies.

Anyway, go check it out.

| Gigagalaxy Zoom |