The Pan-STARRS project, together with astronomers from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy in Heidelberg and the Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching published the largest research of the world that depicts the sky digitally.
The digitization is based on 4 years of observations in 3/4 of the night sky and provides extensive information on over 3 billionmillions stars, galaxies and other sources.
The database includes millions of images with accurate counts of billions of stars and galaxies.
In May 2010, the first Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System, or Pan-STARRS observatory, a 1,8-meter telescope at the top of Haleakala, Maui, began creating a digital map of the sky.
This was the first research in which scientists aimed to be able to observe the night sky in the visible and ultraviolet very quickly over and over again, looking for moving objects and transient or variable objects, including asteroids that could potentially threaten Earth.
The images are extremely detailed as the PS1 digital camera has the highest resolution from any terrestrial telescope (1.4 Gigapixel).
This means that each image consists of 1.4 billion pixels.
The database has an 2 petabyte volume. If you do not understand the number is 2.000 terabyte.
http://pswww.ifa.hawaii.edu/pswww/
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