The Pan-STARRS project, together with astronomers from the Max Planck Institutes for Astronomy in Heidelberg and the Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, published the world's largest survey of 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 telescope 1,8 meters atop Haleakala, Maui, set out to create a digital map of the sky.
This was the first study in which scientists aimed to be able to observe the night in the visible and ultraviolet spectrum very quickly and again, looking for moving objects and temporary or variable objects, including asteroids that could possibly be threaten the 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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