Billions and Billions
Click this link and you’ll be taken to a 24,000 x 14,000 pixel zoomable image of a central region of the Milky Way galaxy. I’m guessing it probably won’t work if you’re reading this on your phone. It was put together by Stéphane Guisard at ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile.
Within this image, should you zoom down (as I have done in the photos above), you will find millions of stars. Millions. Not to mention clouds of nebular gas, dark and light. And all of this from an area of the sky about the same size as two outstretched hands. That leaves a lot of stars unseen, here a mere fraction of the infinite gleam.
When you’re done examining this particular region of the Milky Way, check out ESO’s Gigagalaxy Zoom for more interstellar mind travel. While you’re out journeying on your cosmic imagination quest, squinting against the starshine of these hundreds of billions of points of light that make up our galactic neighborhood, remember not to feel small. Feel tall, because we are the ones who built the tools to capture them all.
(via Bad Astronomy)