April 26, 1999
You are a way for the cosmos to know itself, Carl Sagan once said. On your birthday, the cosmos got to know itself a little better.
USNO-A2.0 Catalog: A Digital Sky
Birthday · April 26, 1999
A little universe, just for you
Your date.
Ready to give.
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APOD published April 26, 1999. Full image credits are on the original APOD entry below. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Here lie 526,230,881 of the brightest stars known. The US Naval Observatory has deployed their monster Precision Measuring Machine to digitize photographic plates covering the whole sky and creating the above map. Yellow corresponds to 150,000 stars per square degree, while dark blue corresponds to only 500 stars per square degree. (For comparison, the Full Moon takes up about 1/4 of a square degree.) The most striking feature on this whole sky projection is the central disk of our Milky Way Galaxy, which stretches across the middle. Dark dust lanes are evident there by the great number of stars they obscure. The two bright spots seen south of the Milky Way's disk are the neighboring Magellanic Cloud galaxies. Anyone can order a free copy of this data, but not everyone can fit data from all 526,230,881 stars on their hard-drive.