In 2012, astronomers used the European Southern Observatory’s VISTA telescope to produce a vast infrared view of the Milky Way’s central region. The observations helped them compile a catalogue containing more than 84 million stars. You can explore the mosaic with ESO’s zoom tool.
How VISTA imaged the galactic centre
Dust makes the bulge—the dense central concentration of stars around our galaxy’s centre—difficult to study in visible light. VISTA observes in infrared, which is less affected by dust, although dark filaments remain visible in the image.
The mosaic combines thousands of observations made through three infrared filters. ESO describes it as approximately 108,200 by 81,500 pixels, covering about 315 square degrees of sky. Its full-size original is listed at 24.6 gigabytes; the interactive version lets readers examine smaller areas without downloading the whole file.
What the observations show
The data came from the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea survey, known as VVV. The 2012 catalogue listed about 173 million objects, including roughly 84 million confirmed stars. At the time, ESO said the resulting colour–magnitude diagram included more than ten times as many stars as previous studies.
By comparing stellar brightness and colour, astronomers can investigate properties of the bulge’s population. The survey also revisits parts of the sky to study stars whose brightness changes over time.
Explore the image
ESO’s viewer lets you move from the full mosaic into individual patches of the galactic centre. Some dust remains opaque even at infrared wavelengths, so the image reveals much that visible-light views miss without showing every object behind it.
Editor’s note, November 6, 2026: We revised this article for clarity, corrected the image dimensions and added the date of the original ESO release.
