Astronomers¹ have released the largest-ever colour image of the whole sky, stitched from seven million images, each made of 125 million pixels.

天文学家最近发布史上最大的整个天空的彩色照片，这张照片由700万张照片拼接而成，每张照片有1.25亿个像素。

zooming² in on the image of the Southern Galactic Cap (lower left) shows the Messier 33 galaxy³ (upper left; a further magnification at centre), and even the NGC 604 'stellar nursery'" src="http://www.enread.com/upimg/allimg/110112/1_110112062705_1.jpg" width="624" height="415" />
Successive zooming in on the image of the Southern Galactic Cap (lower left) shows the Messier 33 galaxy (upper left; a further magnification at centre), and even the NGC 604 'stellar nursery'
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey's latest effort tops its own record, published publicly for professional astronomers and "citizen scientists" alike.

Data from Sloan have helped to identify hundreds of millions of cosmic（宇宙的） objects.

The release was announced at the 217th annual meeting of the American Astronomical⁴ Society in Seattle, US.

Researchers have released an animation⁵（动画） on YouTube demonstrating （天球，天体） .

Michael Blanton, a New York University physicist⁶ who presented the work on behalf of the Sloan team, told the conference that it was difficult to overstate（夸张） the breadth of data Sloan provides.

"There's something like 3,500 papers that have been written on the basis of this data set," he said.

"A few dozen of them are being presented right now, this week at this meeting. They cover topics from the very smallest stars to the most massive black holes in the universe."

Nearly half a billion stars and galaxies⁷ have already been discovered and described thanks to Sloan images, and the new release is sure to significantly increase that number.

Sloan data are also behind the Google Sky service, which allows users to scan the heavens in the same way as scanning their local streets, and the Galaxy Zoo project, which has allowed astronomy enthusiasts⁸（狂热者，热心家） to characterise galaxies from their own computers.