Four days ago, APOD published a portion of the "encompasing infrared view" of the plane of our Galaxy, based on more than 800,000 frames. The view is truly spectacular but, unfortunately, they published only images in low and full resolution: while the former aren't detailed enough to appreciate the tremendous details, the latter are really huge and hard to manipulate (each frame is a low-compression jpeg with 335 Mpixel/80MB size, for a total of more than 5 Gpixel!)
I tried to do something with just aquired quadcore desktop and, in fact, the 3 GB ram allowed me to upload images in PSP, reduce them to halfsize and stitch some of them togheter. My choice was to use the four-color composite version (3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 microns). This zoom sequence demonstrate the incredible amount of info in this survey:
Click to view attachment
upper image shows a 270° global view, obtained by joining the low-res pictures; then I progressively zoomed toward center, enlarging by 8 each time (zoomed portion is highlighted by rectangles). Final picture is half the full resolution and should be about 4° wide (almost 5"/pixel).
If I will find time, I will try to make a zoomed animation in the next days...
I would like to know if anyone made (or want to do) similar attempts, eventually using better SW...

Edit: sorry for partial edit with wrong image in my initial posts, I had some connection issues...

They said on the radio yesterday that it's a 55 meters tapestry.
The bigest one "Tapisserie de Bayeux" is 70 meters

Well, the Spitzer telescope is certainly becoming my favorite unmanned spacecraft:

After it became the first to directly capture the light from exo ‘hot Jupiters ‘ in 2005, it didn’t stop to make great discoveries … Just last moth it enabled scientists to unveil the largest, most detailed infra-red portrait of our Milky Way and this month:
A contender for the title of brightest star in our Milky Way galaxy has been unearthed in the dusty metropolis of the galaxy's center. The reigning "brightest star" champion is Eta Carina, with a whopping solar wattage of 4.7 million suns. But the Spitzer Space Telescope and other ground-based telescopes revealed the "Peony nebula star," the bright stellar bulb bazing with the light of an estimated 3.2 million suns. According to astronomers, it's hard to pin down an exact brightness, or luminosity, for these scorching stars, so they could potentially shine with a similar amount of light.
Now let’s hope that the onboard liquid helium supply will last another year to medio 2009…

Fully agree with Phil... and imagine what can be done with James Webb Telescope!