Milky Way Atlas

This is a map of your home galaxy. Every star on it with a name is a real star in its real, measured position — and the pink beacon is you. Drag to look around, zoom from the whole galaxy down to our own stellar neighbourhood, and tap anything with a name to hear its story.

How to fly

Drag — orbit the galaxy
Scroll / pinch — zoom, from 100,000 light-years down to your own back yard
Tap a name — fly there and learn what it is
✦ Guided tour — eight stops from your doorstep to the galactic core and back

What you're looking at

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across, holding several hundred billion stars. Its middle is not a ball but a bar of old golden stars; two major spiral arms (Perseus and Scutum–Centaurus) sweep out from the bar's ends, with smaller arms between them. The arms aren't solid things — they're slow-moving traffic jams of gas and stars where new, bright blue stars keep igniting, which is why they glow.

The Sun sits about 26,000 light-years from the centre, on a short side-street called the Orion Spur. Almost every star you have ever seen with your bare eyes lives within about 1,000 light-years of home — a small pool of light in one arm of one galaxy.

Is this map real?

The stars are: all 11,466 of them come from the HYG star catalog (Hipparcos, Yale & Gliese surveys, refined with Gaia data), plotted at their real measured positions — every star that has a proper name, every star bright enough to see with the naked eye, and everything within about 80 light-years of the Sun. The named nebulae, clusters, Sagittarius A* and the Magellanic Clouds sit at their published distances too.

The galaxy-scale picture — the arms, bar and dust — is an evidence-based impression, generated to match the NASA/JPL-Caltech annotated map of the Milky Way. It has to be: nobody has ever photographed our galaxy from outside. Every spacecraft humanity has launched is still inside this map, closer to the pink beacon than the width of a single dot.

Every atom in you heavier than helium was cooked inside stars like the ones on this map. Meet those atoms in The Elements, or build one yourself in the Atom Builder.

Star data: HYG database v4.3 (David Nash, The Astronomy Nexus), CC BY-SA 4.0. Object distances: NASA Hubble Messier catalog, ESO/GRAVITY (galactic centre), Miller-Jones et al. 2021 (Cygnus X-1). Galaxy structure after the NASA/JPL-Caltech (R. Hurt) annotated Milky Way map. Rendered with three.js. Explanations by SpecEnvoy. Nothing here is tracked.