This Is NOT the Milky Way. Except It Is.

In 2013, the European Space Agency launched the Gaia astronomical observatory. Its mission: Map the positions and motions of a billion stars in our galaxy. Yes, a billion. The first data release was pretty cool, and some of the early release images were lovely as well. In 2015 the ESA released a nifty map of the Milky Way generated by Gaia data, but it wasn't actually a photograph: They used engineering data from the observatory itself to map out where stars in the sky were, with denser patches ...