Scale: 10²⁰ meters = 100 Em = 100 exameters (~10 000 light years)

Our Spiral Arm

We have traveled outside the flat disk of our galaxy and are looking back at a portion of one of the spiral arms. Only the brightest and closest stars are visible at this distance. The center of the Milky Way is off to the upper left, about 30 cm away at this scale. Our galaxy rotates in a clockwise direction from our point of view north of the solar system.