The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have been a great age of exploration. While the tools for past discoveries were ships, compasses and sextants, the tools of the current age have been rockets, satellites and telescopes.

Within our own galaxy, new technologies have enabled telescopes to see through vast clouds of gas and dust to find what lies beyond. This website presents a map and a set of notes of some of these findings, focusing mostly on objects located within ten thousand parsecs (about thirty thousand light years).

The map shows the estimated positions of bright stars, clusters, molecular clouds and more as they would appear from above and outside the Milky Way galaxy. The zoomable, pannable galaxy map on this website would not have been possible without the decision of the world's astronomers to make their research available to all on the internet, including the huge collection of scientific papers at the Astrophysics Data System, the more than five thousand data catalogs at VizieR, and the great database of almost four million astronomical objects at Simbad.

The main galaxy map is designed to be displayed on relatively low resolution monitors and can be zoomed into four levels of detail. For visitors to this site who want larger maps, a number of options are available as described here.

Our galaxy's stars are born out of giant molecular clouds of gas and dust. About 1900 clouds from numerous catalogs are shown as green spheres on the map. Also shown are more than 5000 of our galaxy's brightest stars, and about 800 star clusters, shown as gold circles roughly representing the cluster size. Many bright stars radiate intense ultraviolet radiation that ionises vast regions of hydrogen gas, causing the gas to glow a dull red. About 1000 of these HII regions are shown as red spheres on the map. You can read more about these objects in the Sources section of this website.

Images of several hundred optically visible HII regions, supernova remnants and other prominent nebulae are available and can be accessed either through the object descriptions available by clicking on objects displayed on the fourth zoom level of the map, or through image gallery pages. There are four image galleries available. A general gallery shows all of the images available on this website. Special galleries show objects in the Sharpless, Gum and RCW catalogs.

In addition to these images of specific objects, I've started a multiwavelength guide to the galactic plane, as revealed in infrared, radio, microwave and hydrogen-alpha frequencies.