Gaia star map: measured stars, not an illustrated sky

Measured facts

Provider

ESA Gaia Archive

Release

Gaia DR3

Catalogue checked

2026-09-05

Coverage

All-sky catalogue volume within 100 pc, subject to the recorded parallax, uncertainty, and G-magnitude selection.

Coordinate frame

ICRS

Ingest

Twelve disjoint level-0 HEALPix/source_id shards are fetched as independent resumable TAP jobs with at most two jobs active by default, then validated, deduplicated, and merged in source_id order.

What the catalogue contains

The volume is built from a single reproducible query against the Gaia archive, then split into twelve disjoint level-0 HEALPix source-id ranges so a failed request can be retried without losing the rest. Each response is hashed, and the combined catalogue and its ordered source-id ledger are hashed separately.

Chunks are partitioned as a 25 pc always-ready core plus octree leaves out to 100 pc. Camera frustum, explored radius, magnitude policy and a strict resident budget decide which leaves load, and every chunk's SHA-256 is verified before GPU buffers are created.

Measured sources rendered

371,766Individual Gaia DR3 catalogue rows inside 100 pc that pass the recorded selection.

Selection

parallax >= 10 mas, parallax_over_error >= 10, non-null G magnitude; every matching Gaia DR3 row inside 100 pc

Distance method

Naive reciprocal of raw Gaia DR3 parallax for this positive, S/N >= 10 sample. No zero-point correction or Bayesian prior is applied.

Motion method

Linear Cartesian propagation from Gaia DR3 J2016.0 proper motion. Gaia radial velocity is included where published; a missing radial component remains unknown and contributes zero only to this short-epoch display approximation.

Reference epoch

J2016.0

Volume structure

25 pc always-ready core plus camera-selected leaves to 100 pc100 checksum-verified chunks, 12 disjoint ingest responses.

Sources with proper motion

371,766

Sources with published radial velocity

169,709Where Gaia publishes no radial velocity, the radial component stays unknown instead of being set to zero.

Direction-only bright field

5,000 sourcesphot_g_mean_mag < 6, brightest 5000 rows. Every source already present in the 100 pc volume is removed from this field, which carries no distance claim at all.

Catalogue integrity

0069111d383d2d2014a73819b637cefee233ed468309115c267098fe6092706dVerified before any GPU buffer is created. Manifest SHA-256 916f07204c066570e2d26b63f44d76ec2a8e9f28b510de203d6c9c59af9a3ed1.

Named destinations inside the volume

Four nearby stars are cross-identified with SIMBAD common names so they can be searched and flown to directly. Each has its own page with the measured astrometry the renderer uses.

• Proxima Centauri
• Barnard's Star
• Wolf 359
• Ross 128

Observational context: the AllWISE infrared layer

Behind the measured stars COSMOS can show AllWISE W1 3.4 μm progressive all-sky survey. It is a real survey observation, but it is a completely different kind of thing from the Gaia points, so it is labelled and bounded separately.

Observations: 2010-01-07 through 2010-08-06, as stated by the pinned IRSA HiPS properties. Passband: W1 3.4 μm infrared. Colour interpretation: monochrome.

• Infrared W1 intensity is not naked-eye or visible-light colour.
• This is an Earth/Solar-System-vantage sky overlay, not the sky observed from the travelling camera; it has no positional parallax.
• The current order-0 overview samples about 6.87 arcminutes per pixel; the instrument's 6.1 arcsecond resolution is not delivered by this overview.
• JPEG display values and exposure-adjusted output are not calibrated scientific photometry.
• The pinned release properties identify the release; individual remote tile bytes are not locally packaged or individually checksum-verified.
• The remote properties describe a HiPS product built from raw Atlas Images and cite 2010 full-cryogenic observations; this is distinct from the separate local AllWISE Atlas-tile proof.
• No renderer activation or browser QA is implied by this provider contract.

Limitations COSMOS discloses

• Distance is derived from parallax, so it is a derived quantity with the stated uncertainty, and it is only defined for sources whose parallax is positive and precise enough to pass selection.
• The catalogue is not a complete census of the solar neighbourhood; it is a quality-gated subset, and its volume boundary is not a physical edge of the Galaxy.
• Brightness and colour are bounded display transfers. They are not absolute luminosities or temperatures.
• The AllWISE layer is an Earth-vantage sky overlay with no positional parallax: it does not move as the travelling camera moves, and its opacity is capped so it cannot be mistaken for measured catalogue data.