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Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.

The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects — arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here.

This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF's NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO’s lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.11909

That's a lot of exposure right there

Some people praise celebrities, but these are the real all stars

I'm actually surprised it's only 10TB

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That's about 3kb of info about each of the 3.32 billion objects. Depending on compression, that could be almost nothing except brightness values for each pixel, or there might be a lot of info tucked in there.

Can we fly around it in a scaled sim yet?

This is amazing! Really cool tool to explore the data also

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Thanks for sharing. The image link is here: https://www.legacysurvey.org/viewer-dev?ra=195.1948&dec=-62.1975&layer=decaps2&zoom=4

It's difficult to find the words to describe the scale. Even at the most zoomed in there are a hundred stars on my monitor. When I zoom out its a banana of endless stars. And it's just a fraction of our own average sized galaxy. And for every star in our galaxy there is a galaxy in the universe with its own set of stars.

A banana of endless stars :,)

Imagine how much artists could buy with so much exposure.