The Milky Way

+ Three missions across the field

Something to go and find.

Each mission is a short ordered path through the atlas. The briefing describes the thing without naming it; the signal readout tells you how warm you are; nothing is ever wrong, and Show me is there the whole time. Everything you log stays marked on the map.

Just look around →

Sources & method

Every measurement, date and claim in this atlas traces to something below. Where a finding is recent enough to still be argued about, the entry says so and the reader is pointed at the paper rather than a summary of it. Nothing here is asserted from memory, and where a number could not be sourced, the field was left out rather than filled in.

How to read the map

• The painted galaxy is procedural, the markers are data. The star field is generated from a seeded model of four logarithmic spiral arms — it is an illustration of the Milky Way's structure, not a photograph, and no marker is ever placed by eye. Every point of interest is projected from its catalogue galactic longitude, latitude and distance at the moment it is drawn, so the picture and the panel cannot disagree.
• The Sun sits 26,700 light-years from the Galactic Centre. Marker positions use x = −d·cos(b)·sin(l), y = −26,700 + d·cos(b)·cos(l). This is a plan view: the vertical component of each object's position is not drawn, so two objects that look adjacent may be far apart above and below the disc.
• Planet positions are computed, not animated. The eight major planets use JPL's Keplerian elements for approximate positions (epoch J2000, rates per century, valid 1800–2050), solved through Kepler's equation each frame. Dwarf planets, small bodies, 3I/ATLAS, and the seven planets of TRAPPIST-1 use published osculating elements; where the phase along the orbit could not be verified, the entry says the position is approximate. TRAPPIST-1's planets orbit a star roughly a tenth the Sun's mass, so the same equation is solved against that star's gravity instead — not just the Sun's.
• Radial distance in the Solar System view is compressed by default. Screen radius is the real distance raised to the power 0.34, so Mercury at 0.39 au and the Oort Cloud at 100,000 au can occupy one view. The scale control switches this off. Body diameters are compressed logarithmically for the same reason and are never to scale against the orbits.
• "Recently" blocks are findings from roughly the last two years. They are the reason this atlas exists. Several of them overturn something a textbook still says — the Andromeda collision, the Planet Nine evidence, and the number of moons Saturn has, among others.

Corrections

• Astronomy moves. If something here has been superseded, the paper linked beside it is the thing to check first — a claim in this atlas is only ever as current as the source under it. Compiled August 2026.