This is awesome: a nine-gigapixel photo of the Milky Way in all its glory and splendor. Click for the link of the full-size image on which you can zoom in, scroll around, and search for the universes secrets.

The epic image is actually a combination of thousands of individual images, taken by the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA infrared survey telescope, that have been perfectly compiled.

Other than just being awesome, the image contains “10 times more stars than previous studies” which will allow scientists to perform numerous, in-depth analyses of the traits of our galaxy and its inhabitants.

At full resolution, the image is a ridiculous 108 200 by 81 500 pixels. If you’re thinking about printing it, you might also want to think about redecorating because at full scale it’ll be 10m high and over 7m wide.

Click here for the zoomable version, or, of course, you could go all out and download the full-size image, it’s only 24,6 GB.

[Source: Wired]