This image, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract — a mere pinprick — of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far.
via the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian
Click here if you want a high res version of the Milky Way snapshot image (spoiler alert: it’s 19MB and 4000×4000)
Filed under: astrophysics outer space stars