Ubersuper

Half Million Galaxies

Whoa. That’s a part of a huge image just released by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep Field #1, a ginormous mosaic of the night sky… and by ginormous, I mean GINORMOUS. It covers a solid square degree of sky — 5 times the area of the full Moon — and tips the scale at a whopping 370 megapixels! It took 5 years and several hundred hours of observing time with the 3.6 meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea to get this massive mosaic.

The image itself may look cool and all, but the true power comes when you use the interactive zoom feature. You can surf the entire mammoth 370 million pixel image, zooming in on galaxies galore. And you won’t run out of objects to investigate any time soon: there are an estimated 500,000 galaxies in the image. Like the Hubble image I posted about yesterday, almost everything you see in the image above is a galaxy, not a star.

What does a half million galaxies look like? | Discover Magazine