This new gigantic 9-Billion-Pixel photo of Milky Way’s center, from the VISTA infrared survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, contains more than 84 million stars. Image credit: ESO/VVV Consortium. Acknowledgement: Ignacio Toledo, Martin Kornmesser
The Dark Energy Camera is a 570-Megapixel digital camera (built at Fermilab) at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Image credit Fermilab.
Watch one of the first images from the world’s most powerful digital camera, after the jump, which is set to capture images from eight billion years ago.
These amazing deep space images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, have lain hidden in data vaults. That was until the European Space Agency opened them up to the public, invited skywatchers and awarded prizes to the top ten entries.
Josh Lake of the United States won with this awesome image of NGC 1763, part of the N11 star-forming region of the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Big, beautiful spiral galaxy M101 is almost twice the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy, about 170,000 light-years across! Also known as the Pinwheel Galaxy, M101 lies within the boundaries of the northern constellation Ursa Major, about 25 million light-years away. This multiwavelength view of this large spiral galaxy, is a composite of images recorded by space-based telescopes in the 21st century. Image credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL, Caltech STScI
Our neighbor Andromeda Galaxy (also known as M31), 2.5 million light-years away and spanning some 260,000 light-years. It took 11 different image fields from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) satellite’s telescope to produce this gorgeous portrait of the spiral galaxy in ultraviolet light. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
ESO astronomers have used the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope to capture an image of NGC 6744. This impressive spiral galaxy lies about 30 million light-years away in the southern constellation of Pavo (The Peacock). But this view could almost be a picture postcard of our own Milky Way, taken and sent by an extragalactic friend, as this galaxy closely resembles our own.
This band is the disk of our spiral galaxy. Since we are inside this disk, the band appears to encircle the Earth. The above spectacular picture of the Milky Way arch, however, goes where the unaided eye cannot. Photographer Juan Carlos Casado.
