Today, the European Southern Observatory released a series of images from the VLT Survey Telescope, which is the largest visible light telescope in the world. Its lenses focus light towards the OmegaCAM, a massive 32 CCD digital camera that captures an astounding 268 megapixels per image.
For as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by the universe. One of the things that I most appreciate about the world of science and research is the amount of information that's shared openly, without restrictions or silly licensing. The ESO has made available a series of images that use the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license, which allows anyone to share and remix the source material. Amazingly, they've included some incredibly high resolution assets, including a 530MB image of the Omega Centauri globular cluster.
Here's a resized crop of the entire image:
Impressive on its own, but here's a 100% crop of the very middle of the image, taken from the full size 14540px by 14540px image:
To put things in perspective, the image directly above represents a tiny 15px by 15px region from the image above it. Pretty inspiring.
Upon first view, the radial nature of the full image reminded me of the e8 group that I made wallpaper out of in a previous post. Creating desktop wallpaper for myself is something I do pretty regularly, so I'm always excited to have a high resolution master asset to work from. Normally, this stuff never leaves my machine, but I figured I'd share this one with whoever wants it:
I've done some processing on the original image to deepen the blacks, taken some samples from the e8 group rendering that I used previously, and added a 360 degree radial hue shift to keep with the circular theme.
To download a package with many different resolutions and crops, click here.
(there's also a bonus for my fellow 27" and 30" monitor people)