The vast sky only reveals a teeny tiny part of our galaxy to us humans. However, there is so much more to that! And no, you don’t have to be Scott Kelly or a super cool NASA astronaut to witness all that. While light pollution and the cloud cover tend to veil the vast universe, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) has given us humans a great gift.
ESO has completed the APEX Telescope Large Area Survey of the Galaxy (ATLASGAL), thus giving us an 187 million pixel map of the Milky Way. The best part is that this super stunning image is about four times the size of any image of the galaxy ever released.
The masterpiece has been captured by the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope (APEX), which lies in Chile’s Atacama region. Not only is the image just spectacular, but it also covers an area three degrees in width and 140 degrees in length. Over 70 different papers explain the information that the image holds.
The most surprising part of the map is that as light can only travel at a particular speed and the objects are so far away, the images of the galaxy are basically from the past. It’s like staring back at history!
Image Credit: ESO; Video Credit: washingtonpost.com