A virtual flight that takes the viewer from the Solar System through our Milky Way Galaxy. The journey starts by looking back at the Sun, moving away and travelling between the stars.

The animation is based on data from the second release of Gaia’s satellite, specifically on the 3D position of nearly 97 million stars, the majority of which have the most accurate parallax measurements in the dataset. Accurate parallaxes can be used to directly estimate distances to individual stars.

Acknowledgement: Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC); Gaia Sky; S. Jordan / T. Sagristà, Astronomisches Rechen-Institut, Zentrum für Astronomie der Universität Heidelberg, Germany