ASTRONOMERS RELEASE THE LARGEST COLOR IMAGE OF THE SKY EVER MADE
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey-III (SDSS-III) released the largest and most comprehensive digital color image of the night sky ever made, and its free to all. The image has been put together over the last decade from millions of 2.8-megapixel images, thus creating a color image of more than a trillion pixels—an image is so large and detailed one would need 500,000 high-definition TVs to view it at its full resolution. The new image was unveiled Jan. 11 during the 217th American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
The University of Pittsburgh is one of three Pennsylvania institutions with scientists involved in the SDSS-III project along with Pennsylvania State University and Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Michael Wood-Vasey in Pitt's Department of Physics and Astronomy works on SDSS-III analyzing the positions of distant black holes and confirming potential planets around other stars. Pitt was instrumental in developing the first phase of the SDSS project beginning in 2000 through the work of one-time professor Andrew Connolly, now a professor at the University of Washington. Since then, Pitt astronomers have joined numerous large-survey telescope projects, including the 33-institution Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and CANDELS, the longest project ever carried out with the Hubble telescope.