The goal was to create the most detailed and accurate map of the Milky Way ever. After taking images of the night sky for 13 years, the team has now published the map -- and it's absolutely massive.

Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky. This collage highlights a small selection of regions of the Milky Way imaged as part of the most ... [+] detailed infrared map ...

Standing beneath the Milky Way has always been a beautiful sight, if you were lucky enough to find dark skies on a dark night. But the revelation of recent advances in digital photography is that ...

In 1920, astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis held a Great Debate. Shapley argued that the spiral nebulae were small and in the Milky Way, while Curtis took a more radical position that they ...

Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky. Summer is the best time of year for seeing the Milky Way from the northern hemisphere—and parts of August are the very best.

"I expect Gaia's best results are still to come." Night has fallen for the star-tracking European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft, Gaia. The mission, which has been mapping the Milky Way for the ...

The European Space Agency's Milky Way-mapper Gaia has completed the sky-scanning phase of its mission ... of building the largest, most precise map of the Milky Way, showing us our home galaxy ...

Light pollution has long troubled astronomers, who generally shy away from deep sky observing under full Moon skies. The ...

As astronomers scanned the night sky with larger telescopes ... astronomer William Herschel used star counts to map out the Milky Way. He cataloged a thousand new nebulae and clusters of stars.