For those of you who haven’t heard of it, the Chandra X-ray Observatory is the most sophisticated X-ray observatory yet built and was launched and deployed by Space Shuttle Columbia in July of 1999.
Yesterday NASA released a 400 by 900 light-year(!) mosaic of several Chandra images of the central region of our Milky Way galaxy which reveals hundreds of white dwarf stars, neutron stars, and black holes bathed in an incandescent fog of multimillion-degree gas.
Check out the Chandra photo album