Galaxy Map

With the availability of a new catalog of about 500 HII regions with Gaia-derived distances, I combined them with masers out to 12 kpc as explained a couple of days ago here:

https://bsky.app/profile/galaxymap.bsky.social/post/3mdpkwujep22j

and have been tweaking my two arm Milky Way schematic. Here is the latest version.

Galaxy Map (@galaxymap.bsky.social)

I mentioned a few weeks ago that a research term have finally put out a catalog of about 500 HII regions with Gaia-derived distances. Here's an image out to a radius of 9 kpc that I created in Blender with the galactic centre to the right.

Bluesky Social
Feb 2 at 9:38amWeb
Show threadGalaxy MapFeb 2

The dashed line shows a circle with radius 6 kpc. Almost all Gaia data in the galactic plane appears within this circle. Orange is the inner ring, red the bar, and blue the two spiral arms. I sometimes call this a fiddler crab model since one arm is much larger than the other. (Image: NOAA)

As always I should note that there is no consensus on the structure of the Milky Way. This is my personal model.