Using what has been called "the most complicated camera ever built", connected to a large optical telescope in New Mexico, astronomers have begun a project to probe 40 times further into space than any earlier survey of the stars.

Members of the project displayed their initial results when they unfurled a 11 metre (35ft) long photo at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

An galaxy pictured on the first image

The initial image contains a fraction of 1% of the final data. The goal is to catalogue 100 million of the brightest galaxies and 100,000 quasars, which are the exploding hearts of galaxies almost at the edge of the observable universe.

When the survey is complete in seven years' time, it will be available to anyone via the Internet.

The survey will also collect the spectra, or light composition of the objects. In the first two weeks of operation, it collected more spectra than all the other surveys ever made.