GoKawiilScientists have pointed telescopes at the sky and mapped the cosmos for centuries. That relentless pursuit is producing maps that are bigger and more detailed than ever. But there’s one map that stands out above the rest, and now it’s the largest 2D map of the night sky ever created.
The best part? Anyone can play with it.
The map, called Data Release 11 or DR11, comes courtesy of the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys team at NSF NOIRLab, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona, with contributions from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and other agencies and organizations.
Covering 75% of the sky across 5.6 trillion pixels, DR11 is the team’s most comprehensive map to date, built upon prior versions of the same map . It expands on DR9 by 50% and brings back northern sky coverage missing from DR10. Based on 263,407 ground-based exposures by 160 scientists, the map catalogs 4 billion objects — including stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids — in visible and near-infrared light.
Already cited in over 1,800 research papers, NOIRLab expects this to remain the premier 2D map of its kind for years. According to co-lead David Schlegel, it also laid the groundwork for identifying 60 million targets for the DESI project and for building a full 3D map, which was completed in 2026. With billions of targets still unstudied, Schlegel told CNET that “plenty of other discoveries” remain hidden in plain sight for public exploration.
Enough talk, let’s play
The map covers 75% of the night sky, with the black swath through the middle obscured by black holes, interstellar dust and other obstacles. Legacy Survey
The map doesn’t look like much at first. But if you pick a spot and start zooming in, you can get a pretty good idea of how vast it really is. What appears to be a cloud of pretty colors is actually billions of objects floating around in space.
You might notice that DR11, which is designed to see out into the universe, doesn’t contain any planets, moons or asteroids within our solar system. That may be a little bit of a bummer for some, but there are plenty of other objects to look for.
Though the user interface is a little overwhelming at first, you really only need four boxes to play around — and all four of them are right next to each other in the bottom-left corner.
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