ESA's video
Herschel's View of the Galactic Plane was released in April. It's fascinating, almost hypnotic, but at 10 minutes long, you might not want to see all of it unless you're feeling meditative.
They made the video by stitching together hundreds of hours of observations made for the Herschel Infrared Galactic Plane Survey.
The Milky Way, which is about 100,000 light years in diameter, is shaped like a disc. From where we see it, the disc - with stars, gas and dust - looks like a band of stars wound around the sky. If you've ever been to a dark sky site, you've probably seen it. As we look at the Milky Way edge-on, we're looking along the plane of the Galaxy. That's where most of the stars are. The video includes almost 40% of the Galactic plane.
Since Herschel is an infrared telescope, the different wavelengths of infrared light have been assigned colors so that we can see the shapes and structures.
Credit: ESA/Herschel/PACS, SPIRE/Hi-GAL Project
Acknowledgement: G. Li Causi, IAPS/INAF, Italy