Gigagalaxy Zoom

The European Southern Observatory has a neat, high-res, zoomable image of the entire night sky up on their website. It’s a total of about 800 million pixels. Once you go to their website, click on Zoom In! and then use the slider at the bottom to zoom. There’s an amazing about of detail.

It wasn’t taken with a big exotic telescope. Instead the photorgapher (Segre Brunier) assembled it from 1,200 pictures taken with a Nikon D3.

It took about 340 hours of computer time to assemble the finished image.

To get the entire sky, he needed to take pictures from a couple of different locations in Chile and the Canary Islands. You can read more about the project here.