The Core of the Milky Way Galaxy

 The image, taken by Stéphane Guisard at the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile, spans an area of the sky roughly 30° x 20°, or about twice the area of the sky you can cover up with your outstretched hand. That’s a lot of territory. Taken as part of the GigaGalaxy Zoom project, it's a mosaic of 52 fields shot over 29 nights for a total of 200 hours of exposure over 1200 separate photos.

Look at all of them! And then compare the size of this small piece of the picture to the whole thing…and realize this is only a tiny fraction of the stars in the galaxy. There are tens of millions of stars in the whole zoomable picture at least, but hundreds of billions in the Milky Way. In other words, this huge picture crammed full of stars shows less then a thousandth of all the stars in our galaxy!

Go here for the full, zoomable picture.