Count how many stars are in NASA’s panorama

If you have ever gazed up at a cloudless night time sky and wondered exactly how many stars are up there, NASA has released an image that can help you answer that question. Pictured above (albeit much smaller than the original) is a beautiful panorama that was captured by the space agency’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Depicting over 563 million heavenly bodies, the image consists of 18,000 different images that have been stitched together to create what you see above. I would hate to have been the person responsible for sitting at a desk and working that out! It took over two years to capture enough images of the heavens to create the images you see above. The WISE project took more than 2.7 million pictures (how would you like to have an SD card big enough to hold that many?) and is still clicking away in orbit. As mentioned above, 18,000 images were selected, then put together to represent what the astronomical space telescope is “seeing” as it floats in the ether. NASA says that this in effect accomplishes the original mission of the project by providing scientists a large amount of research fodder to study for discovery purposes. Already astronomers have found a new asteroid that shares the same orbital path around the sun as the Earth (cue the Armageddon soundtrack). With 100 research papers having already been written about the results, there is sure to be more interesting information that comes out in the future. While seeing a flat image of the galaxy is interesting, it’s much better when seen as a spherical image. A Finnish photog took it on himself to translate the picture into an experience that has some depth as well as exploration points. Of course, it’s not in English, but it’s still awesome to check out.