Every star in the Milky Way glimmers with perfect clarity in the cloudless sky: diamonds flung across black velvet.

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This isn't the first time the ESO has shown a love for large captures: it managed to stitch together a massive 9-gigapixel image of the Milky Way out of thousands of photographs taken with its VISTA telescope earlier this fall.

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Hong-Sheng Zhao of Leiden University in the Netherlands calculates that a close encounter with another one of the Milky Way's satellites, the Large Magellanic Cloud, could have knocked Sgr into a closer orbit two or three billion years ago.

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The photo shows the plane of the Milky Way, which is often described as looking like two fried eggs back-to-back, with a flat disk in the middle.

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