The European Space Agency has completed its Millennium Star Atlas, a vast stellar map that provides a census of the Milky Way galaxy. The atlas provides a three-dimensional view of the distribution of stars in our region of the galaxy and was derived from observations made by the Hipparcos satellite.
It shows more than one million stars and 10,000 of the nearest are labelled with their distances away, as determined by Hipparcos. It reveals stars that are 100 times fainter than those visible to the naked eye, presenting them in a 17-volume catalogue of closely spaced numbers that looks something like a telephone book. The complete work contains 1,548 sky charts and the locations and shapes of 8,000 remote galaxies. Hipparcos was launched in 1989.