Scientists have published the largest astronomical image of all time

The largest astronomical image ever made is so big we can’t even show it here.

Astronomers have created the largest astronomy photo ever created – a monstrous, eye-melting image of our own Milky Way, with 46 billion pixels.

Obviously, you have to view it via a special online viewer – a Full HD monitor has a couple of million pixels, a tiny fraction of the 46 billion in the image.

It took five years to photograph, using telescopes at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) laboratory in Atacama, Chile.

The team took pictures of the southern sky every night, taking multiple pictures of 268 sections of the night sky.

Finally, they stitched the images together into one vast, mind-boggling image at 194 gigabytes in size.

You can view the image via an online tool here – and search for recognisable objects in the night sky, such as ‘Eta Carinae’ or ‘M8’.

Agencies/Canadajournal