The most comprehensive view of the night sky has been released at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle, the BBC reported.

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has mapped the Milky Way Galaxy’s northern and southern hemispheres, represented as two big clusters in the newly-released image. 

The ongoing survey has already identified nearly half a billion astronomical objects, including asteroids, stars, galaxies and distant quasars. It is hoped that the new image will help to identify more, detailing their positions, colors and shapes.

The U.S. team started the mapping project at the Apache Point Observatory, New Mexico, in 1998.

They used what was then the world’s largest digital camera -- a 138-megapixel imaging detector on the back of a dedicated 2.5-meter telescope.

“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,” reported HPC wire, a news website covering the latest technological developments.

By Lee Woo-young (wylee@heraldcorp.com)