I recently came across a neat website by Kevin Jardine: Galaxy Map.

It’s an odd site. It’s not clear how it’s all organized. It looks as if the site’s owner planned to write a book about mapping our galactic neighborhood, but the project got abandoned at some point. Nevertheless there’s a lot of interesting data and some gorgeous maps there, if you dig around a bit for them. In particular, Mr. Jardine has used the Gaia data tranches to do some really interesting mapping of relative star densities, the location of clusters and major nebulae, and the location of super-bright stars.

The most immediately useful page on the site appears to be at Galaxy Map Resources, but there’s also a collection of maps at Galaxy Map Posters that includes the one I included at the top of this post.

Really neat material there, if you’re at all interested in writing near-solar neighborhood interstellar fiction.