Where is Gaia looking?

This psychedelic swirl plots the viewing direction of the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope as it maps our galaxy. The craft sweeps its two telescopes around in four rotations per day, while also changing the orientation of its spin axis over 63 days. The colour of each line of dots represents the direction of the scan with respect to north (top of image) – indicated by the border, where each block of colour spans 18°. Densely overlapping lines denote areas that have been scanned many times in many directions, but the gaps will close as Gaia continues its work. Read more about Gaia on page 66.