guide
Beyond the Milky Way
Our galaxy is not the edge of the map. Compare the Milky Way with the Local Group, approach Andromeda, and step back into the nearby-galaxy catalogue. You choose when to move.
Measured facts
- Pace
- Four stops, no autoplay or forced timing
- Controls
- Drag to orbit; scroll or pinch to travel; return to Earth at any time
Your route
1. Leave our galaxy. Begin with the labelled Milky Way model. Next, compare it with the galaxies in our neighbourhood.
2. The Local Group. Galaxy centres use published distances. Exploration enhances display sizes; Scientific mode keeps physical sizes.
3. Meet Andromeda. M31 combines catalogue geometry, an attributed DSS2 portrait and reconstructed depth. This is not a flight between individually measured stars.
4. A wider neighbourhood. The nearby-galaxy catalogue is a selected sample, not a complete census. Every galaxy retains its source and limitations.
What the journey means
These camera flights are a way to compare scales, not a spacecraft trajectory or a physical travel-time simulation. Each stop uses the existing COSMOS scene and its ordinary controls. Restart revisits the first stop; exit keeps you where you are, with unrestricted exploration.
Planet positions come from a bounded JPL Horizons archive. Gaia stars have measured astrometry. Galactic forms and density tracers are explicitly reconstructed: their light, colour and unseen depth do not become measurements because the camera can move through them.
Beyond the Milky Way, published catalogue distances place galaxy centres in three dimensions. Samples have selection limits and distance uncertainties. Exploration mode enhances display sizes and brightness for discovery; Scientific mode retains physical sizes. Neither mode changes the catalogue coordinates.
Sources and further reading
Content updated 2026-10-19. Every value on this page is computed from the shipped datasets; where a source publishes no value, the page says so instead of estimating one.