Stars, stars and MORE stars..

Following up from a post I did last week about my star work in the style of David Spero, I have had someone contact me, who sent me a link to a very interesting article on Discover Magazine - Click to read article.
Whether it be the population of the UK, how many grains of sand are on my local beach or even the hairs on my head, I find large scales extremely hard to understand as it is but this research really puts things into perspective!!

Astronomers have produced a very detailed map of the night sky in infrared using the VISTA telescope in Chile and the UKIRT telescope in Hawaii.

I thought this picture above was incredible as it was, I never knew that there were so many stars in such a combined arrangement, that was until I continued down the page to find this..

..the first image I saw was only the tiny section shown in this picture..

..which was a smaller section of this..

..that again, was only a tiny part of this final telescopic image.  Incredible.

In this original image there are over an billion stars.  But what is even more amazing is that this survey only captures the thickest part of our Milky Way, technically only a very small section of the whole sky!
With less than 1% of the total number of stars in our galaxy I will leave you to try and get your head around exactly what is up there above us, in the entire universe!