Milky Way image is a galactic-sized portrait of billions of stars

A photo shoot by a dark-energy camera on a telescope in Chile has captured more than three billion stars and galaxies in one of the biggest sky surveys ever. The observations were made over two years, focusing on the Southern Hemisphere sky. Shown in great detail, most of these Milky Way objects are stars. The total also includes small, distant galaxies that may have been mistaken as individual stars.