The pictures of more then 563 million stars, galaxies, asteroids, planets and other objects were taken by a Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). WISE is NASA infrared-wavelength astronomical space telescope that was launched on December 14, 2009.
WISE has been taking and collecting photos of the night sky for two years and among 2,7 million images taken, NASA chose 18.000 of them and stitched them together into a one humongous image of epic proportions.
Click here for the Zoomable panoramic photograph and exlpore our magnificent sky, or click here for a direct download of 180 megapixel (19000 x 9500) and 73 Megabytes big image.
we will have to wait for the Hubble's successor, the next generation telescope called James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
James Webb is an international project with about 17 countries involved and lead by NASA. The size of the mirror (eyes of the telescope) will be 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and will observe the deep space in infrared. Cool thing about the new telescope is, it's going to travel in an orbit about 1.5 million kilometers (1 million miles) away from Earth, the imagery of the deepest ever space mankind has ever observed should be breathtaking. The Hubble telescope is orbiting on a distance of only 559 kilometers (347 miles) away from Earth.
The primary missions for the JWST will be the search for the light of stars and galaxies that were formed after a big bang (when it all supposedly started) and search of the origins of life.
NASA still plans to launch the James Webb Space Telescope on a European Rocket in August 2018.
So Mukarachi, you will have to wait for a while for the JWST to launch and arrive to it's orbiting position. Meanwhile you can watch the telescope being build in real-time here:
