Fly Through the Milky Way: ESA’s Stunning New 3D Galaxy Map Lets You Tour Our Galaxy
Background: Mapping the Milky Way with Gaia Launching on 19 December 2013, the ESA’s Gaia spacecraft set out to chart our Milky Way in unprecedented detail ucl.ac.uk. Stationed at the stable L2 point about 1.5 million km from Earth – the same deep-space neighborhood as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope – Gaia had a very different mission: to survey our own galaxy rather than peering at the distant universe earthsky.org. Over more than a decade, Gaia repeatedly scanned the sky with a billion-pixel camera, measuring the position, brightness, and motion of billions of stars multiple times earthsky.org earthsky.org. This technique
