German scientists have put a giant space photo online, a 46 billion pixel photo, one of a combined size of 194 gigabytes. No fret, you do not have to download it if you want to look at it. They have put up a website through which you can zoom in, change the colors, etc.

The image contains data gathered in astronomical observations over a period of five years.

For five years, the astronomers from Bochum have been monitoring our Galaxy in the search of objects with variable brightness. Those objects may, for example, include stars in front of which a planet is passing, or multiple systems where stars orbit each other and which obscure each other every now and then.

For his PhD thesis, Moritz Hackstein is compiling a catalogue of such variable objects of medium brightness. It uses data from a team led by the University's Chair of Astrophysics that takes pictures of the southern sky night after night.

They use the telescopes at Bochum's university observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile. More than 50,000 new variable objects, which had hitherto not been recorded in databanks, have been discovered by the researchers so far.

(Source)

Astronomers have created the largest astronomy photo ever created – a monstrous, eye-melting image of our own Milky Way, with 46 billion pixels.
Obviously, you have to view it via a special online viewer – a Full HD monitor has a couple of million pixels, a tiny fraction of the 46 billion in the image.

It took five years to photograph, using telescopes at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) laboratory in Atacama, Chile.
he team took pictures of the southern sky every night, taking multiple pictures of 268 sections of the night sky.

Finally, they stitched the images together into one vast, mind-boggling image at 194 gigabytes in size.
You can view the image via an online tool – and search for recognisable objects in the night sky, such as ‘Eta Carinae’ or ‘M8’.

(Source)

Edit: To load the photo, you do need at least one gigabyte (1024MB) of free memory for your browser.

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Wow, that's a big picture.

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