Interesting

NASA showed how the sky above the Earth has changed. It took 12 years to shoot (video)


Every six months, NASA's Near-Earth Object Exploration Spacecraft, or NEOWISE, travels halfway around the Sun, taking pictures in all directions.

Stitched together, they form an "all-sky" map that shows the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects.


This illustration shows a spacecraftWide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in Earth orbit. Using 18 sky maps created by the spacecraft (the 19th and 20th maps will be released in March 2023), the scientists created a time-lapse view of the sky. It shows the changes that have taken place over the past decade.

Each map is a huge resource for astronomers, butviewed sequentially as slow motion, they serve to be even more useful to better understand the universe. Map comparison helps to detect distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time.


Spacecraft Wide-field Infrared SurveyExplorer (WISE) operates in Earth orbit. The WISE mission ended in 2011, but in 2013 the ship was repurposed to search for and study asteroids and other near-Earth objects (NEOs). The mission itself and the spacecraft were renamed NEOWISE.