An escape from the storm coverage
It’s been hard to pull yourself away from the constant stream of information about Hurricane Sandy. I am guilty of watching various updates all day yesterday myself. It can get depressing quickly. Especially if you have friends or family in an affected area.
I am not sure if this is helpful but you can take a look at a Spectacular 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way. It might be a reminder of how small we are in the grand scheme of things. It might also remind you of just how beautiful our universe is.
What ever it does I hope it gives you some peace or at least a brief distractions from it all.
from Gizmag.com
The European Space Observatory (ESO) has released an impressive 9-gigapixel image of the central part of the Milky Way Galaxy. The historic image contains some 84 million stars and represents the largest ever catalog of the center of our home galaxy.
The image was taken by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) at the ESO Paranal Observatory in Chile, using three different infrared filters to cut through dust fields that would usually obscure the view. Measuring a spectacular 108,500 x 81,500 pixels, it contains more than ten times the number of stars found in any previous study. If the image were to be printed at the resolution of a typical book, it would measure a full 9 x 7 meters (29.5 x 23 feet). Despite the impressive detail and staggering scale of the work, it actually only covers some 315 square degrees of the sky – less than one percent of the entire sky.
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