Science: Super cool all-sky images of the local universe

The NOIRLab (National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) has released two versions of the all-sky image of Earth's night sky. One version is just the night sky at this link. The other is the night sky with annotations showing outlines of the constellations at this link. 

NOIRLab is the United States' national center for ground-based, nighttime optical and infrared astronomy. It is funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement.

The images were taken from four different dark night sky locations on Earth, two in the Northern Hemisphere and two in the Southern Hemisphere. Then the images were somehow pieced together.

Here's how to see this: 
1. Open the link and you will see a page with this pure night sky image.


This is for the constellation-annotated image.


2. Click on the little "full screen" box symbol at the upper left, but do not click anywhere in the image because that stops it from slowly rotating. If you do stop the rotation, you can restart it by reloading the page, or manually rotate it by grabbing the image with your cursor and moving it by moving the cursor.

3. Just watch the image slowly rotate to show the entire night sky from any place on Earth. This is awesome, mind-blowing work.





By Germaine: By golly, I'm impressed!

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