A very cool interactive image of the Milky Way

10/25/2012 11:48pm by 1,249

A very cool new look at the Milky Way, click through and you can zoom in on specific areas. See examples below.

More from the LA Times:

Astronomers from the European Southern Observatory have released a striking new image of the Milky Way galaxy that shows more than 84 million stars, 10 times more than previous studies have provided. The zoomable image, constructed by computer-merging thousands of individual images, contains more than 9 billion pixels and would, if printed at the resolution of a typical book, measure 30 feet long and 23 feet tall.

The team identified 173 million individual objects in the photo composite. Eighty-four million of them could be positively identified as stars; the remainder were more distant objects, such as other galaxies, or could not be unambiguously identified.

You start with the Milky Way:

Then can zoom in:

Then can zoom in a lot:

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