The Milky Way is our home galaxy, a vast collection of stars, planets, and other celestial objects bound together by gravity. It’s a barred spiral galaxy, which means it has a central bar-shaped structure composed of stars, with spiral arms extending outwards.

NASA has captured detailed pictured of the Milky Way using its infrared cameras.

The photo depicts Milky Way galaxy ablaze with dust in an all-sky map from Planck, an ESA mission with NASA contributions. The towers of fiery colors are actually dust in the galaxy and beyond that has been polarized. The data show light of 353 gigahertz or 0.85-millimeter wavelengths, which is longer than what we see with our eyes.

Using data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, scientists discovered a gigantic, mysterious structure in our galaxy. This feature looks like a pair of bubbles extending above and below our galaxy’s center. Each lobe is 25,000 light-years tall and the whole structure may be only a few million years old.

This panorama provides an unprecedented X-ray view above and below the center of the Milky Way. This new survey builds on previous NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory observations, stitching together 370 separate pointings of the telescope. In this main image, different bands of X-rays from Chandra (orange, green, purple) have been combined with radio data (gray). These data reveal threads of superheated gas and magnetic fields near the center of the Milky Way.

NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) observed magnetic fields showing in this composite image of Centaurus A. They’re shown as streamlines over an image of the galaxy taken at visible and submillimeter wavelengths by the European Southern Observatory and Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (orange), X-ray wavelengths from NASA’s Chandra X-Ray observatory (blue) and infrared from NASA‘s Spitzer Space Telescope (dark red).

The center of our Milky Way galaxy is hidden from the prying eyes of optical telescopes by clouds of obscuring dust and gas. But in this stunning vista, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope’s infrared cameras penetrate much of the dust, revealing the stars of the crowded galactic center region.