Space buffs will like this one: NASA has created a massive atlas of the sky using its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) probe.
This picture comes to us courtesy of Geeokosystem. NASA stitched together 18,000 photos from the probe.
The image above, meant to be a 360 degree view of the sky has around 560 million stars. Most of them have never been seen before. The probe, launched in 2009, captured 2.7 million images, once every 11 seconds, about 15 trillion bytes of data. (Let’s see if that guy who posted a video of pictures he took of himself each day can top that!)
The best part is that researchers from all over the world and the general public will be able to access this data. NASA has a website where you can download other cool images that the WISE probe has taken. Space science seems to resonate with a lot of people, even if they’re not fans of other kinds of science, possibly because of all the cool imagery like this it’s produced. NASA may be out of the business of shuttling humans up into space (astronauts have to bum rides on Russia’s Soyuz capsules), but it’s heartening to know that they still have space on their minds.
You might also want to check out some awesome images NASA has taken of Earth. You might also be interested in a Kinect-controlled robot they built.
