Milky Way Pics of the Day

These two images are portions of a new photo showing the central area of the Milky Way galaxy, released by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The photo shows 84 million stars in an image measuring 108,500×81,500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels, and is actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory's VISTA survey telescope.

Don't miss the zoomable version.