Onboard Diary

"To Infinity... and beyond!" GigaGalaxy Zoom

(Above:The Milky Way)

Through 3 gigantic images, the GigaGalaxy Zoom project reveals, in the first place, a sight of the night sky at first glance from one of the areas with the highest level of darkness at night: the Atacama dessert, in Chile. From this first image, you can zoom in on an area of the Milky Way. And after this, finally, we have the possibility of going even further and immersing into the details of the nebula, as if we were looking at it with a professional telescope.

In this article by Javier Pedreira, published in Microsiervos, we have a more thorough summary of what you can find in the official website and in the three pictures:

The first picture, taken by Serge Brunier, gathers in 800 million pixels a first sight of the night sky, but from the privileged observatories of La Silla and El Paranla.

The second, created by Stéphane Guisard, gathers in 340 million pixels the central part of our galaxy, from the Sagittarius constellation to Scorpio.

The third picture shows only a degree and a half of a sky's square, centred on the Lagoon Nebula, just the way professional astronomers see it.

This project has been developed for the celebration of The International Astronomy Year 2009 and the images have been taken from the observatories of La Silla and Paranal.

(Above: The Lagoon Nebula)

As specified in the official website:

The project reveals three amazing, ultra-high-resolution images of the night sky that online stargazers can zoom in on and explore in an incredible level of detail.

The GigaGalaxy Zoom project thus illustrates the vision of IYA2009, which is to help people rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky.

In the official GigaGalaxy Zoom website you can not only have access to the afore-mentioned pictures and travel around Space through them, but you can download them too.

Undoubtedly, it's worth having a look (or many) at them. They're amazing.