NASA unveils record of half a billion stars

The WISE mission captures a supernova tearing through a distant galaxy in the constellation of Cassiopeia A £200 million Nasa space telescope has completed its 14-year mission - stitching together an incredible 'sky Atlas' from 2.7 million telescope images which capture the whole sky

around us, and pick out details from cold, dusty galaxies, to tiny, distant stars.
Half a billion stars are visible in the 'Atlas', which shows every part of the sky visible from Earth, captured by hi-tech infrared instruments which can pick out dusty and distant objects invisible to many other telescopes.

‘Today, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community,’ said Edward Wright, WISE principal investigator at UCLA, who first began working on the mission with other team members in 1998.
Since it launched in 2009 the £200million infrared telescope, WISE, has been scanning the cosmos with some of the most sophisticated cameras ever deployed in space.
The final image stitches together 18,000 WISE images.
WISE mapped the entire sky in 2010 with vastly better sensitivity than its predecessors. It collected more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light, capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies.
Since then, the team has been processing more than 15 trillion bytes of returned data. A preliminary release of WISE data, covering the first half of the sky surveyed, was made last April.

‘With the release of the all-sky catalog and atlas, WISE joins the pantheon of great sky surveys that have led to many remarkable discoveries about the universe,’ said Roc Cutri, who leads the WISE data processing and archiving effort at the Infrared and Processing Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
‘It will be exciting and rewarding to see the innovative ways the science and educational communities will use WISE in their studies now that they have the data at their fingertips.’
Among the eye-opening images captured by WISE s one of the Comet Siding Spring, seen streaking across the sky with a ghostly trail and the gigantic Andromeda galaxy, which lies 2.5million light-years from Earth.
WISE also snapped the stunning rose-shaped Berkeley 59 cluster of young stars, burning away in their stellar nursery.