Astronomers have released one of the biggest data dumps of the Milky Way ever, cataloging an incredible 3.32 billion cosmic objects in detail. The end result is a gigantic image that can be zoomed in and out for a stunning sense of scale.
Anyone who’s ever looked up at the sky on a clear night, far from any light pollution, has marveled at just how many stars there are. It may seem like an impossible task to ever try to count and catalog them all, but generations of surveys like PAN-STARRS, Sloan and Gaia have tried to do just that. Each one has produced ever more detailed views of the cosmos, and now we may have the most in-depth one yet.
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The latest is the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2), which is observing the disk of the Milky Way at optical and near-infrared wavelengths of light. The instrument is located on the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope in Chile, at an altitude of 2,200 m (7,200 ft), which gives it a clear view of the southern sky.
Read more: New Atlas
