It's easy to look upon the sheer, unthinkable vastness of God's creation and consider yourself pathetically small, insignificant, irrelevant.
But just remember — He created all of this and somehow still manages to love you beyond all comprehension. Believe it.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects — arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date.
That kind of scale is hard to comprehend. But it's real:
That image is so large that it's hard to resolve it within the limitations of normal computing. Here's a better shot, from just one tiny section of the field:
Try counting all that before dinner!
