This image is a portion of a new photo showing the central area of the Milky Way galaxy, released by astronomers at the European Southern Observatory's Paranal Observatory in Chile two weeks ago.

The photo shows 84 million stars in an image measuring 108,500Ã—81,500, which contains nearly 9 billion pixels, and is actually a composite of thousands of individual photographs shot with the observatory's VISTA survey telescope.http://www.eso.org/public/images/eso1242a/zoomable/

I need the country.... I'd love to go up north for a chance to see even the tiniest fraction of stars you can see in that photo. I'm not quite the cosmo-phobe Yodes is, but I love sky gazing a heck of a lot.

EDIT: I'm also new to life. But is it true you can't actually *see* the Milky Way from anywhere? You need an exposed camera shot in order to pull it off anyways. I keep hearing conflicting things and I can't go up North to find out otherwise.