The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's breathtaking image, released at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, is actually a mosaic stitched together from 7 million pixels, each made of 125 million pictures, the BBC said.
It was made using a 138-megapixel camera attached to a 2.5-meter telescope at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico.
M. Blanton / SDSS-III
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) releasing the largest digital color image of the sky ever made.
"There are half a billion objects detected in this image," said David Weinberg, an Ohio State University astronomer who worked on the SDSS image, according to The Guardian newspaper. "About a quarter of a billion stars and a quarter of a billion galaxies."
"You can see individual stars, galaxies –- the detail is incredible," Marek Kukula of the Royal Greenwich Observatory told the BBC.
Michael Blanton, a New York University physicist who represented the image on behalf of the Sloan team, said the image is filled with galaxies in the process of being born or crashing violently into one another.
"It's not just really big, it's really useful," he said, according to Nature.com.
Astronomers said the data from the image could help us better understand the origin of our own galaxy.