A 9 Billion Pixel Image of the Milky Way from ESO

The European Southern Observatory has just released a massive 9 billion pixel image of the Milky Way made from a composite of photos taken by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy ("VISTA") at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. This is the largest most detailed image of the Milky Way ever taken. The version below, expanded, is a measly 380 KB (~1.2 million pixels). It's not grainy; those are stars.