Antonov 225 Mriya Takeoff at Minneapolis: Largest cargo plane

The Antonov An-225 Mriya is a strategic airlift cargo aircraft that was designed by the Soviet Union's Antonov Design Bureau in the 1980s.

The An-225's name, Mriya (Мрiя) means "Dream" (Inspiration) in Ukrainian. It is powered by six turbofan engines and is the longest and heaviest airplane ever built with a maximum takeoff weight of 640 tonnes.

It also has the largest wingspan of any aircraft in operational service. The single example built has the Ukrainian civil registration UR-82060.

A second airframe was partially built; its completion was halted because of lack of funding and interest.

This image shows A Volga-Dnepr Airlines Antonov An-124

Credit: Wiki

The Antonov An-225, initially developed for the task of transporting the Buran spaceplane, was an enlargement of the successful Antonov An-124.

The first and only An-225 was completed in 1988. After successfully fulfilling its Soviet military missions, it was mothballed for eight years.

It was then refurbished and re-introduced, and is in commercial operation with Antonov Airlines carrying oversized payloads.

The airlifter holds the absolute world records for an airlifted single item payload of 189,980 kilograms (418,834 pounds), and an airlifted total payload of 253,820 kilograms (559,577 pounds).

It has also transported a payload of 247,000 kilograms (545,000 pounds) on a commercial flight.

SLAC 3,200-megapixel camera: World's largest digital camera

SLAC is leading the construction of the 3,200-megapixel camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons. 

The digital camera will be the largest ever built, allowing LSST to create an unprecedented archive of astronomical data that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand mysterious dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe. 

Credit: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Plans for the construction of the world's largest digital camera at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have reached a major milestone.

The 3,200-megapixel centerpiece of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which will provide unprecedented details of the universe and help address some of its biggest mysteries, has received key "Critical Decision 2" approval from the DOE.

"This important decision endorses the camera fabrication budget that we proposed," said LSST Director Steven Kahn.

"Together with the construction funding we received from the National Science Foundation in August, it is now clear that LSST will have the support it needs to be completed on schedule."

Science operations are scheduled to begin in 2022 with LSST taking digital images of the entire visible southern sky every few nights from atop a mountain called Cerro Pachón in Chile.

It will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed.

Over a 10-year time frame, the observatory will detect tens of billions of objects, the first time a telescope will catalogue more objects in the universe than there are people on Earth, and will create movies of the sky with details that have never been seen before.

LSST will generate a vast public archive of data, approximately 6 million gigabytes per year, that will help researchers study the formation of galaxies, track potentially hazardous asteroids, observe exploding stars and better understand dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95 percent of the universe but whose nature remains unknown.

"The telescope is a key part of the long-term strategy to study dark energy and other scientific topics in the United States and elsewhere," said David MacFarlane, SLAC's director of particle physics and astrophysics.

"SLAC places high priority on the successful development and construction of the LSST camera, and is very pleased that the project has achieved this major approval milestone."

This is a rendering of the LSST observatory (foreground) atop Cerro Pachón in Chile. 

When LSST starts taking images of the entire visible southern sky in 2022, it will produce the widest, deepest and fastest views of the night sky ever observed. 

Over a 10-year time frame, LSST will image several tens of billions of objects and create movies of the sky with unprecedented detail. 

Credit: Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Project Office

The LSST team can now move forward with the development of the camera and prepare for the "Critical Decision 3" review process next summer, the last requirement before actual fabrication of the camera can begin.

Components of the camera, which will be the size of a small car and weigh more than 3 tons, will be built by an international collaboration of labs and universities, including DOE's Brookhaven National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and SLAC, where the camera will be assembled and tested.

"Many excellent, hard-working people have been developing LSST for a long time and it is gratifying to see the quality of their efforts being recognized by the DOE approval," said Steve Ritz of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the lead scientist of the camera project. "We are all excited about the amount of great science that LSST will enable."

The Dwarf Planet is officially the Largest in Solar System

This image shows an artist impression of the Dwarf Planet Eris.

Since Eris is larger than the Dwarf Planet Pluto, it is presented as the tenth planet.

However, a long-lasting debate over the status of Pluto forced the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to develop a precise definition of the term planet. 

On August 24, 2006, the IAU adopted a resolution, under which both Pluto and Eris were classified as "dwarf planets" and subsequently added to the Minor Planet Catalogue.

Our universe is full of mysteries but there are a few things we know for certain.

For instance, that the Earth orbits the Sun and not vice versa, or that there are eight planets in the solar system. If you still believe in the latter, you probably have not heard of Eris.

This is an image of the dwarf planet Eris (center) and its companion satellite Dysnomia (at 9 o'clock position) taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on Aug. 30, 2006. Hubble observations were obtained on Dec. 3, 2005 and Aug. 30, 2006 using the Advanced Camera for Surveys.

Credit: Hubblesite

Eris is the largest dwarf planet discovered in 2005 using the Hubble Telescope and was initially described by NASA as the Solar System's tenth planet.

Eris is 27% larger than Pluto, has a diameter of 2.3 kilometers and one companion satellite (moon) called Dysnomia.

The planet orbits the sun at a distance of 96.4 astronomical units, taking 557 years to complete one lap.

Whilst it sounds like a fully-fledged planet, the word 'dwarf' tends to instill confusion. Eris is what astronomers call a plutoid; a trans-Neptunian object located in the part of the solar system known as the Kuiper belt.

A dwarf planet is now officially defined as a "celestial body in direct orbit of the Sun that is massive enough for its shape to be controlled by gravity, but that unlike a planet has not cleared its orbit of other objects."

The number of known planets in the solar system was therefore reduced to eight, as it was before Pluto's discovery in 1930.

With the new status Eris was granted its present name. Previously, the newly discovered space object was informally called Xena after a character from the popular television series Xena: Warrior Princess, but given the discord it caused in the astronomical community, the name of the Greek goddess Eris, a personification of strife, suits this planet like no other.

NASA SDO: Largest Sunspot in 24 Years Mystifies Scientists

The Jupiter-sized sunspot AR 12192 is the largest active region seen on the sun in 24 years. 

Credit: NASA SDO

The biggest sunspot to grace the face of the sun in more than two decades just rotated out of Earth's view, but it was responsible for kicking up some truly amazing solar activity this week.

The sunspot (called Active Region 12192 or AR 2192) shot off four powerful flares in four days recently, with many more smaller flares sprinkled in as well.

The sunspot region was about the size of the planet Jupiter and is the largest solar flare observed in 24 years.

AR 2192 was actually one of the biggest observed sunspots of all time, ranking 33rd largest of 32,908 active regions since 1874, according to NASA scientists C. Alex Young and Dean Pesnell. But how does a sunspot grow this big?

"The simple answer is we really don't know," Young told reporters.

"Being close to solar maximum [the peak in the sun's 11-year solar cycle] means there is more concentrated magnetic field and magnetic energy under the solar surface waiting to bubble up, but the question of why it comes up as one spot instead of two or more is really still unknown, a mystery."

"I guess a good analogy is when you twist a rubber band or piece of string," Young added. "Why do, say, three knots or bunches form instead of two or four?"

"The physics is probably too complicated for us at this point but we can get a handle on, say, when the knots will start to form once we better understand the properties of the rubber band or string and how much twist we put into them. We are not to that point with the sun but we may get there eventually."

The largest sunspot since November 1990 is seen traveling across the front of the sun in these images from NASA's SDO, captured Oct. 17-Oct 29, 2014.

Image Credit: NASA/SDO

Sunspots are active areas on the sun. They generally form when magnetic field lines are warped, and if they become twisted.

Part of it may break out, and show up on the face of the star. Sunspots look dark because they are cooler than the area surrounding them.

This sunspot is particularly special because of the somewhat strange way scientists have seen it behave.



Instead of shooting out huge bursts of plasma, called coronal mass ejections (CMEs), with powerful flares, the giant sunspot hasn't produced significant CMEs during its time rotating in view of Earth, according to Young.

"What's really curious about it [the large sunspot] is that it's produced so many flares of pretty good size, but little or no coronal mass ejections," Young said.

"It's not that it's never happened before, but it tends to be the case that when you have a big flare, you generally get a big CME."

Earth-directed CMEs are responsible for geomagnetic storms that can harm satellites in orbit or even knock out power grids on the planet.

A CME produced by a sunspot larger than AR 2192 knocked out the power in Quebec, Canada, in 1989, Young said.

The sunspot just rotated out of view of Earth, according to Spaceweather.com, but that doesn't necessarily mean that AR 2192 won't make another appearance on Earth's side of the star.

Planet Labs Ready To Launch Largest Satellite Fleet In History

Planet Labs has announced that it has confirmed launches for more than 100 satellites over the next 12 months. The satellites will launch on rockets from the USA and Russia.

This constitutes the largest constellation of satellites manifested in history.

These new launches will build on Planet Labs first 28 satellites, Flock 1, which were launched in January.

This constellation will allow Planet Labs to image the whole earth every 24 hours.

"We are imaging the planet to save the planet," said Will Marshall, cofounder of Planet Labs.

Imaging the Earth at this frequency will help us to measure things from deforestation, to improving agricultural yield, to detecting overfishing. Our mission is to create information people need to help life on the planet."

"Getting 100 satellites on the launch manifest is a major milestone in the new space industry," said Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and board member of Planet Labs and SpaceX.

"The small form factor requires less space on the rocket, allowing for more flexibility for launch configurations and a constellation of 100 satellites is unprecedented."

This announcement comes on the heels of a $52 million Series B round of financing for Planet Labs in December led by Yuri Milner.

ESO VLT Atacama: Largest yellow hypergiant star observed

HR 5171, the brightest star just below the centre of this wide-field image, is a yellow hypergiant, a very rare type of stars with only a dozen known in our galaxy. 

Its size is over 1,300 times that of the Sun -- one of the 10 largest stars found so far. 

Observations with ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer have shown that it is actually a double star, with the companion in contact with the main star. 

Credit: ESO/Digitized Sky Survey 2

ESO's Very Large Telescope has revealed the largest yellow star—and one of the 10 largest stars found so far.

This hypergiant has been found to measure more than 1,300 times the diameter of the Sun, and to be part of a double star system, with the second component so close that it is in contact with the main star.

Observations spanning over 60 years also indicate that this remarkable object is changing very rapidly.

Olivier Chesneau

Using ESO's Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI), Olivier Chesneau (Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, Nice, France) and an international team of collaborators have found that the yellow hypergiant star HR 5171 A is absolutely huge—1300 times the diameter of the Sun and much bigger than was expected.

This makes it the largest yellow star known. It is also in the top ten of the largest stars known, 50% larger than the famous red supergiant Betelgeuse and about one million times brighter than the Sun.

"The new observations also showed that this star has a very close binary partner, which was a real surprise," says Chesneau.

"The two stars are so close that they touch and the whole system resembles a gigantic peanut."

The astronomers made good use of interferometry to combine the light collected from multiple individual telescopes, effectively creating a giant telescope up to 140 metres in size.

The new results prompted the team to thoroughly investigate older observations of the star spanning more than sixty years, to see how it had behaved in the past.

Chesneau concludes "The companion we have found is very significant as it can have an influence on the fate of HR 5171 A, for example, stripping off its outer layers and modifying its evolution."

This new discovery highlights the importance of studying these huge and short-lived yellow hypergiants, and could provide a means of understanding the evolutionary processes of massive stars in general.

More information: This research was presented in a paper "The yellow hypergiant HR 5171 A: Resolving a massive interacting binary in the common envelope phase", by Chesneau et al., to appear in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. arxiv.org/pdf/1401.2628v2.pdf

ESA Gaia: Largest Space Camera is ready to map a billion stars

Now whizzing through space, 1.5 million km from Earth. 

Credit: ESA-CNES-Arianespace / Optique Vidéo du CSG - G. Barbaste

After its successful launch in December, European Space Agency's (ESA) Gaia has now taken up its position in space and is ready to survey the skies.

With the help of two onboard telescopes focused onto the largest ever space camera, Gaia is estimated to catalogue nearly one billion stars in its 5-year mission.

Like Hipparcos before it, ESA's Gaia will map stars in the Milky Way. It will do this by measuring the brightest billion objects and determine their three-dimensional distribution and velocities.

It also has the ability to measure the temperature, mass, and chemical composition of these billion objects.

Gaia will be able to discern objects up to 400,000 times dimmer than those visible to the naked eye.

The positional accuracy of its measurements are akin to measuring the width of a human hair at a distance of 500 km.

The process will involve scanning each part of the sky an average of 70 times over its five-year mission lifetime.

This means scanning the entire sky twice every 63 days, once through each of the two telescopes, making it a powerful tool for spotting time-evolving phenomena such as binary systems, supernovae, and exoplanets.

Compared to ESA's Hipparcos Space Telescope, ESA's Gaia will be able to measure 500 times the number of stars, extending to objects 1000 times dimmer than the dimmest that Hipparcos could catalogue.

Test image from Gaia: Slightly shaky to start with, but it’ll get there. Credit: ESA/DPAC/Airbus DS

The technology that makes this possible is the largest camera ever launched into space – 940 million pixels.

That is why a lot of effort before launch was on figuring out exactly how to get the huge amount of data Gaia will produce back down to Earth.

When a picture is taken a number of charged-coupled devices (CCDs), the stuff most digital camera sensors are made off, are dedicated to spotting objects before they fall onto the main focal plane.

This allows the instrument to track the objects as they pass and only retain small regions around the object, reducing the file-size needed to be sent to Earth.

In five years it will send only 100 TB of data (1 TB is 1000 GB).

Once the data arrives to Earth, there is a system in place to analyse the data and distribute alerts to ground-based observatories if anything quickly evolving and potentially interesting is spotted, such as supernovae.

The catalogue produced by Gaia is expected to contribute to many areas of astrophysics;

• multiply our database of exotic objects such as' 
• exoplanets, 
• white and brown dwarfs, and 
• supernovae many-fold, contribute to more precise measurements of General Relativity, 
• help to constrain the measurements of the presence and location of dark matter, and 
• give us more accurate information about our galactic neighbourhood and its evolution.

NASA SDO IRIS: Recording its largest Flare to date

On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Solar Observatory IRIS witnessed its strongest solar flare since it launched in the summer of 2013. Credit: NASA/IRIS

On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS), witnessed its strongest solar flare since it launched in the summer of 2013.

Solar flares are bursts of x-rays and light that stream out into space, but scientists don't yet know the fine details of what sets them off.

IRIS peers, with unprecedented resolution, into a layer of the sun's lower atmosphere just above the surface, called the chromosphere, the second of the three main layers in the Sun's atmosphere that is roughly 2,000 kilometers deep.

However, IRIS can't look at the entire sun at the same time, so the team must always make decisions about what region might provide useful observations.

On Jan. 28, scientists spotted a magnetically active region on the sun and focused IRIS on it to see how the solar material behaved under intense magnetic forces.

At 2:40 p.m. EST, a moderate flare, labeled an M-class solar flare, which is the second strongest class flare after X-class solar flare, erupted from the area, sending light and x-rays into space.

IRIS studies the chromosphere, which is key to regulating the flow of energy and material as it travels from the sun's surface out into space.

Along the way, the energy heats up the upper atmosphere, the corona, and sometimes powers solar events such as this flare.

IRIS is equipped with an instrument called a spectrograph that can separate out the light it sees into its individual wavelengths, which in turn correlates to material at different temperatures, velocities and densities.

The spectrograph on IRIS was pointed right into the heart of this flare when it reached its peak, and so the data obtained can help determine how different temperatures of material flow, giving scientists more insight into how flares work.

On Jan. 28, 2014, NASA's recently-launched IRIS, observed its strongest solar flare to date. 

Credit: NASA /IRIS /SDO /Goddard Space Flight Center

The IRIS telescope was designed and built by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory while Montana State University faculty and students assisted in the design of the spectrograph.

The Ames Pleiades supercomputer is used to carry out many of the numerical simulations that are led by the University of Oslo.

IceCube World's largest particle detector detects first high-energy neutrinos from the cosmos

This is the highest energy neutrino ever observed, with an estimated energy of 1.14 PeV. 

It was detected by the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole on Jan. 3, 2012. IceCube physicists named it Ernie.

Twenty-eight events with energies around and above 30 TeV were observed in an all-sky search, conducted between May 2010 and May 2012, for high-energy neutrino events with vertices contained in the IceCube neutrino detector. Credit: Credit: IceCube Collaboration

The IceCube Neutrino Observatory, a particle detector buried in the Antarctic ice, is a demonstration of the power of the human passion for discovery, where scientific ingenuity meets technological innovation.

Today, nearly 25 years after the pioneering idea of detecting neutrinos in ice, the IceCube Collaboration announces the observation of 28 very high-energy particle events that constitute the first solid evidence for astrophysical neutrinos from cosmic accelerators.

Francis Halzen

"This is the first indication of very high-energy neutrinos coming from outside our solar system, with energies more than one million times those observed in 1987 in connection with a supernova seen in the Large Magellanic Cloud," says Francis Halzen, principal investigator of IceCube and the Hilldale and Gregory Breit Distinguished Professor of Physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

"It is gratifying to finally see what we have been looking for. This is the dawn of a new age of astronomy."

Details of the research appear in a manuscript published in the Nov. 22, 2013 issue of the journal Science.

Because they rarely interact with matter, the nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos can carry information about the workings of the highest-energy and most distant phenomena in the universe.

Gregory Breit

Billions of neutrinos pass through every square centimeter of the Earth every second, but the vast majority originate either in the sun or in the Earth's atmosphere.

Far rarer are neutrinos from the outer reaches of our galaxy or beyond, which have long been theorized to provide insights into the powerful cosmic objects where high-energy cosmic rays may originate: supernovas, black holes, pulsars, active galactic nuclei and other extreme extragalactic phenomena.

IceCube, run by the international IceCube Collaboration and headquartered at the Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC) at UW–Madison, was designed to accomplish two major scientific goals: measure the flux, or rate, of high-energy neutrinos, and try to identify some of their sources.

This is an artistic rendering of IceCube DOMs below the Antarctic ice. Inside IceCube, a total of 5,160 sensitive detectors hang from 86 steel cables. 

Credit: Jamie Yang, The IceCube Collaboration.

The analysis presented in the Science paper reveals the first high-energy neutrino flux ever observed, a highly statistically significant signal (more than 4 sigma) that meets expectations for neutrinos originating in cosmic accelerators.

"From hints in earlier IceCube analyses, we have used improved analysis methods and more data to make a significant step forward in our search for the elusive astrophysical signal," says collaboration spokesperson Olga Botner, of Uppsala University.

"We are now working hard on improving the significance of our observation, and on understanding what this signal means and where it comes from."

More information: Evidence for High-Energy Extraterrestrial Neutrinos at the IceCube Detector; The IceCube Collaboration; Science (2013); DOI: 10.1126/science.1242856

Turanor PlanetSolar: Largest solar boat arrives in London, England

The MS Turanor PlanetSolar is a scientific research platform for the University of Geneva and has been enjoying a great deal of interest from around the world during its groundbreaking mission to explore the intricacies of the Gulf Stream and other facets of our changing climate.

The innovative design of the craft means that it can generate up to 480kWh from over 800 solar panels and boasts a top speed of 14 knots. 

The vessel carries an array of different instruments, both inside and out, used for monitoring every facet of the climate during its voyage. 

Data gathered is still being processed, but it is hoped to shed further light on climatic changes going on around the world.

The dual-hull of the Turanor PlanetSolar is over 100 feet long and gets through the water after converting the sun's rays via two electric motors. 

A huge bank of lithium-ion batteries are enclosed in each of the hull sections.

The catamaran has enjoyed a high profile so far, having successfully completed its first trip around the world under solar power, between September 2010 and May 2012. 

The first time around, the Turanor PlanetSolar made it across the Atlantic in 26 days, a record-breaking time which it has since trimmed down to 22 days, gaining it an entry into the Guinness World record books.

Largest Undersea Methane seep harbours variety of extreme life

U.S. researchers say they've discovered what may be the world's largest methane seep on the ocean floor, where life thrives under extreme conditions.

A marine research expedition sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration located the seep deep in the western North Atlantic Ocean, far from the life-sustaining energy of the sun.

Life exists in the seep using a process known as chemosynthesis, which begins with bacteria that use the methane to make energy, researchers said.

That forms the basis for life in the harsh environment and could help scientists better understand how organisms can survive under these types of extreme conditions, they said.

"Studies of this kind and of these communities help scientists understand how life thrives in harsh environments, and perhaps even on other planets," researcher Steve Ross of the University of North Carolina Wilmington said.

The unique ecosystem, almost two-thirds of a mile long and hundreds or yards across, is host to a variety of sea creatures including sea cucumbers, mussels, shrimp and a variety of fish, the researchers said.

IC 1101: Largest Galaxy in our known Universe

IC 1101 is the largest known galaxy which is situated at the Abell 2029 galaxy cluster. It is a giant elliptical galaxy or otherwise known as the "Supergiant Ellipticals".

It is about 1.07 billion light years away in the constellation of Serpens. It is approximately 5.5 million light years in diameter, making it the largest galaxy in terms of breadth (as of 2010).

It is about 50 times the size and 2000 times massive than our Milky Way Galaxy. It has about 100 trillion stars compared to roughly 100-200 billion stars in our galaxy.

NASA finds largest molecule

This artist's impression illustrates fullerenes being formed in a planetary nebula, and drifting out into the interstellar medium. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)/ESA/K. Noll (STScI)

Astronomers have found evidence of buckyballs - carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls - in the nebula around a distant white dwarf star. The discovery marks the largest molecules known to exist in space.

Normally found in chemistry labs, where they are made by vaporizing graphite in the presence of helium, buckyballs were long suspected to form inside stars.

"As soon as they were discovered in the lab it was actually suggested they would be very good candidates to be found in space," astronomer Jan Cami of the University of Western Ontario, who led the new study, told SPACE.com.

Researchers had searched for buckyballs before in the gas and dust between and around stars, but the evidence was inconclusive. Cami and his colleagues identified buckyball molecules, known as C60 because they are made of 60 carbon atoms each.

The buckyballs are about 1 nanometer in size, about three times larger than water molecules, which are about 0.3 nanometers in size and consist of three atoms (one oxygen atom and two hydrogen atoms). One nanometer is a billionth of a meter, or about one ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair.

The buckyball molecules were discovered in the planetary nebula Tc-1, which is about 6,500 light-years away in the southern constellation Ara. Despite their name, planetary nebulas are actually clouds of gas around stars, not planets.

"What we see is a very clean and very recognizable fingerprint for only two species," Cami said - C60 and a closely related molecule called C70, made of 70 carbon atoms. Both C60 and C70 belong to a class of molecules termed buckminsterfullerenes, or just fullerenes, after architect Buckminster Fuller.

Together the two fullerenes make up about 3 percent of the available carbon around the star, the researchers reported.

Tc-1 contains what is known as an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. The inner regions of these stars have become dense, dim stars called white dwarfs, while their outer stellar envelopes have sloughed off.

The resulting cloud of shed layers undergoes chemical reactions and is ionized by radiation from the inner white dwarf, creating a planetary nebula that will eventually become part of the interstellar medium

World's Largest Milky Way Image Unveiled

The world's largest picture of the Milky Way, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, is being unveiled today at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.

The new image is of galactic proportions, covering an area that is 120 feet (37 meters) long, 3 feet (1 meter) tall at its sides and 6 feet (2 meters) tall in the middle, where our galaxy's central bulge is depicted.

The panorama represents the combined effort of two Spitzer survey teams, who used two of the telescope's onboard instruments, the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) and the Multiband Imaging Photometer.

The large image was made from stitching together 800,000 individual pictures taken by Spitzer, for a total of 2.5 billion infrared pixels. It covers an area of the sky about as wide as a pointer finger and as long as the length of arms outstretched, which might sound small, but covers about half of the entire galaxy, says Robert Hurt, of the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.

"This is the highest-resolution, largest, most sensitive infrared picture ever taken of our Milky Way," said Sean Carey of the Spitzer Science Center, who led one of the teams that created the image.

"I suspect that Spitzer's view of the galaxy is the best that we'll have for the foreseeable future. There is currently no mission planned that has both a wide field of view and the sensitivity needed to probe the Milky Way at these infrared wavelengths," said Barbara Whitney of the Space Science Institute in Madison, Wis., also part of one of the Spitzer teams.

The image is set to be unveiled by the scientists who created it at 3 p.m. EST at Chicago's Adler Planetarium.