This morning, the European Space Agency unveiled a new, highly detailed sky map of the Milky Way Galaxy that showcases the brightness and positions of nearly 1.7 billion stars. It’s the most comprehensive catalog of stars to date, and it includes precise details about many of the stars’ distances, movements, and colors as well. With the map’s release, astronomers are hoping to use this information to learn more about the structure of our galactic home and how it first formed billions of years ago.

— New galactic map shows the positions and brightness of 1.7 billion stars by The Verge

The numbers are just mind boggling, precise positions of over 1 billion stars.

The 360 degrees view of what the Gaia spacecraft mapped is worth clicking through for.