Largest Sky Map Revealed An Animated Flight Through the Cosmos

Largest Sky Map Revealed An Animated Flight Through the Cosmos

535,995 newly observed galaxies, 102,100 quasars, and 116,474 stars...

this is really cool!

Jim Goldstein posted this on his blog with a comment "To fully respect nature it helps to know where your place is in it. -- There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, each containing between 100 billion and 400 billion stars. This is well worth watching full-screen with the volume loud." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFXEg-3MBv8&feature=player_embedded

from here -- "This animated flight through the universe was made by Miguel Aragon of Johns Hopkins University with Mark Subbarao of the Adler Planetarium and Alex Szalay of Johns Hopkins. There are close to 400,000 galaxies in the animation, with images of the actual galaxies in these positions (or in some cases their near cousins in type) derived from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7. Vast as this slice of the universe seems, its most distant reach is to redshift 0.1, corresponding to roughly 1.3 billion light years from Earth. The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) spectroscopic data in Data Release 9 includes well over half a million galaxies at redshifts up to 0.8 – roughly 7 billion light years distant – and over a hundred thousand quasars to redshift 3.0 and beyond."