If you want to know what the night sky looks like, turn to Sloan. The Sloan Digital Sky project has produced the largest, most detailed image of the night sky that has ever been taken. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has already lead to the discovery of nearly half a billion new stars and galaxies, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to scientists who are familiar with the data. The image of the night sky consists of 7 million individual images knitted together.
“There’s something like 3,500 papers that have been written on the basis of this data set. A few dozen of them are being presented right now, this week at this meeting. They cover topics from the very smallest stars to the most massive black holes in the universe,” said Dr. Michael Blanton, a New York University physicist who presented the Sloan team’s work at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society. ”You can compare it to the National Geographic Palomar Survey of the late 1950s. This is something that 50 years later is still a really important reference to astronomers; we use it ourselves to better understand our own images. SDSS is the digital version of that.”
If Sloan Digital Sky Survey sounds familiar, it should. It’s the company behind Google Sky, Google’s sky monitor, and the Galaxy Zoo Project, which allows home users to characterize galaxies from the comfort of their home. The camera that took the image, a 125 million pixel monstrosity, has been retired after completing its photographic journey across the sky.
Tags: astronomy, space, largest image of space ever taken, largest ever picture of the night sky, night sky picture, world’s largest night sky picture, giant picture of the night sky, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Google Sky, Galaxy Zoo Project, Michael Blanton, American Astronomical Society, weird science, world’s largest camera takes giant image of the night sky
