The world's largest picture of the Milky Way was unveiled today in Chicago, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, measuring a whopping 120 feet across.

The panorama represents the combined effort of two Spitzer survey teams, who used two of the telescope's onboard instruments, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer. The large image was made from stitching together 800,000 individual pictures taken by Spitzer, for a total of 2.5 billion infrared pixels. It covers an area of the sky about as wide as a pointer finger and as long as the length of arms outstretched, which might sound small, but covers about half of the entire galaxy, says Robert Hurt, of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.


Just another friendly reminder that our entire lives are insignificant and that none of us will ever know one iota of the true mysteries of the universe that we live in. Happy Friday! [Space.com via The Daily What]