RE: Voyager 1 reaches interstellar space
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey uses a telescope to map the objects in the sky. Located at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico, it gathers about 200GBs of data per night. Data collection began in 2000, and the lastest imaging data release covers over 35% of the sky, with photometric observations of around 500 million objects and spectra for more than 3 million objects.
The video below is a computer animation that uses images of galaxies along with spectral data from the survey and locates them in relative position to one another. The video moves through a "near" slice of the universe and depicts about 400,000 galaxies (Note that there are estimated to be a couple hundred billion galaxies in the known universe -- so for every galaxy shown in this video there are another 500,000 that are not depicted). Typical galaxies are comprised of 100-200 billion stars and who knows how many planets.
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