NASA's beautiful panorama of the southern sky!

NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is an all-sky survey mission exploring thousands of exoplanets around bright stars near our solar system. Recently, it captured the Milky Way in its glory across a sea of ​​stars. The US Space Agency unveiled a beautiful panorama of the southern sky spoken by TES during science observations for the first year of the mission, which was completed on 18 July.

A dip in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy joins this wide southern sky mosaic in a star-studded landscape.

According to NASA, the southern panorama was constructed from 208 individual images taken by TES, which focused on individual stars and planets at one time. NASA then pied with Mosaic at its Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. While TESS was imaging the panorama, it discovered 29 exoplanets and more than 1,000 candidate planetary astronomers are now investigating.

Splitting the southern sky into 13 regions, TESS photographed each of them for about a month using four cameras. Remarkably, Tess cameras capture a full field of sky every 30 minutes as part of their quest for exoplanet transit. The images that make up the panorama are part of more than 20 terabytes of southern sky data that date back to the first year of satellite operation.

In addition to his planetary discoveries, TESS's notable ideas include yet another comet, the C / 2018 N1 through our solar system and an entire supernova. After completing its southern survey, the satellite has now focused its attention on the northern sky, which it will study for the next one year.