EYE OPENER
A map of many colours
KITT PEAK NATIONAL OBSERVATORY, ARIZONA, USA
What you’re looking at here is a map. Not of Earth, the Solar System, or even the Milky Way, but of the Universe on the most astronomical of scales. This sprawling multi-coloured web contains some 600,000 galaxies and is superimposed onto an image of NOIRLab’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope, which was used to capture the data. The map was put together as part of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) survey, a five-year mission to create the largest 3D map of the Universe. So vast is this data set, and by extension, our Universe, that all the galaxies here represent less than 0.1 per cent of the full survey volume. Feeling insignificant yet?