NASA’s NEOWISE Space Telescope Takes 12-Year Time-Lapse Movie of Entire Sky

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun every six months, taking images in all directions. Once stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), astronomers have constructed what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade.