This oval picture might look like a beautifully decorated Easter egg, but it represents the entire sky. This picture is actually a map, showing how the Gaia satellite scanned the sky during its first 14 months at work. The colours tell us how often Gaia looked at different areas of the sky. The regions it scanned most often are shown in blue; the areas Gaia paid the least attention to are coloured in peach.
Credit:
ESA/Gaia/DPAC; acknowledgement: B. Holl (University of Geneva, Switzerland) on behalf of DPAC