14 DAY TRIAL // The Milky Way is made of many, many stars, so ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile didn't actually try to capture them all. It got very close though.
The VISTA survey telescope at the ESO's Paranal Observatory has been taking pictures of stars and entire space regions for a long time.
VISTA is able to see through dust fields that usually obscure the view of telescope, thanks to three separate infrared filters. Astronomers have been using the information to see how galaxies form and evolve.
Now, thousands of individual images have been melded into a single, 9-Gigapixel photo of the galaxy,
In the resolution of a standard book, that would make it 9 meters-long and 7 meters-wide (29 x 23 feet). The downsized photo is right above, but it does no justice to the real thing.
Go here to zoom all the way into the heart of the cosmos.