Thursday, December 10, 2009

What does a half million galaxies look like?

Whoa. That’s a part of a huge image just released by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep Field #1, a ginormous mosaic of the night sky… and by ginormous, I mean GINORMOUS. It covers a solid square degree of sky — 5 times the area of the full Moon — and tips the scale at a whopping 370 megapixels! It took 5 years and several hundred hours of observing time with the 3.6 meter telescope on top of Mauna Kea to get this massive mosaic.