A billion stars revealed
Astronomers have today released a picture containing more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It combines data from two near-infrared¹ telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile ... The full image contains 150 billion pixels, and the detail it contains is only revealed by the three zoom levels, centred on G305, a large and complex star-formation region: the innermost zoom covers a tiny fraction of the full image, but still contains more than ten thousand stars.