An interactive three-dimensional chart of the nearest stars and galaxies to the Sun. Rotate and zoom the Universe to see the structure of the cosmos.

There are approximately 9000 stars visible with the naked eye. This map is plotted in galactic coordinates - the plane of the Milky Way galaxy passes across the middle of this chart with the zero point of galactic latitude and longitude pointing directly at the galactic centre.

This map shows the full extent of the Milky Way galaxy - a spiral galaxy of at least two hundred billion stars. Our Sun is buried deep within the Orion Arm about 26 000 light years from the centre. Towards the centre of the Galaxy the stars are packed …

These various maps can be analysed to show the precise spiral form of the Galaxy, see Jacques Vallée's various studies of the Milky Way ( 1, 2, 3). The Milky Way is probably a four-arm logarithmic spiral. Our Galaxy is also a barred-spiral galaxy.

2023年12月19日 · Explore our Milky Way in this map of the entire sky. It shows the total brightness and colour of 1.8 billion stars observed by ESA’s Gaia satellite and released as part of Gaia’s Early Data Release 3 (Gaia EDR3).

2023年6月9日 · Researchers have used data gathered by the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite to construct the highest-resolution 3D sky map of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies ever made. The publicly available map is based on observations made by Gaia between July 2014 and September 2015.

2021年4月21日 · The new map reveals how a small galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) – so named because it is the larger of two dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way – has sailed through the Milky Way’s galactic halo like a ship through water, its gravity creating a wake in the stars behind it.