These two images are portions of a new photo showing the central area of the Milky Way galaxy, released by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile.

The photo shows 84 million stars in an image measuring 108,500×81,500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels, and is actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory's VISTA survey telescope.

Don't miss the zoomable version.

Previously responsible for these colorful ferrofluids, Fabian Oefner is back, this time with Nebulae: Outer Space in Studio.

Oefner used fiber optic lamps on long exposure to make some truly astounding starscapes, well worthy of the Hubble.

[laughingsquid]

Alex Rivest's timelapse video of the view from the International Space Station pays special attention to the stars the ISS crew can see from their low-earth orbit vantage point.

The timelapse doubles as a great advertisement for NASA's excellent Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth, where footage and images taken from the ISS are made available to the public.

[devour]