Each year the TED Active conference is a place where some smart people gather to share ideas and talk about projects they are working on. One of the projects that is being talked about at the conference is a new 360-degree view of our galaxy that NASA has collected.
The new panorama that NASA is showing off is cool in that it offers astronomers and scientists a 360-degree look at the cosmos around us. The Spitzer Space Telescope took the giant panorama over the last ten years.
The panorama consists of over 2 million infrared photographs that the Spitzer has snapped over the years. The resulting image is huge and NASA says that if the panorama were printed, it would require a surface as large as a football field. To view the giant image NASA created a special viewer for anyone to use.
NASA says that the image will be viewable in a way similar to how you can view content on Google maps. Viewers will be able to pan around the panorama and zoom in to see more detail. The visualization captures about 3% of the sky around the Earth focusing on a band around the Earth sitting on the plane of the Milky Way. That means that while showing only 3% of the sky, the panorama has over half the stars in the Milky Way.