Learn MORE about Nessie and the Milky Way's Bones

To find out more online about the Milky Way’s Bones, or about Nessie, visit these links:

Special thanks to Robert Hurt of NASA, for working with other astrophysicists to "draw" the Milky Way cartoon used in this work, and for helping create the high-res Spitzer images linked above.

LEARN MORE about our TOOLS

Several of the tools used in this work were developed by collaborators within the extended Seamless Astronomy team, based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, The Harvard Institute for Quantitative Social Science, the Harvard Library, the NASA Space Telescope Science Institute, and Microsoft Research.

Open Publishing: Authorea.com is a new online collaboration and archiving service for scholars, currently in alpha release. The Bones of the Milky Way is the first scholarly paper to be developed and published, as an Open Science project, using Authorea. (contact: Alberto Pepe, apepe@cfa.harvard.edu, @albertopepe)

Open Data  The Astronomy Dataverse Network All data from this project will be available and archived at The Astronomy Dataverse Network when the paper is published. At present, viewers can see the CO data used in the paper here. (contacts: August (Gus) Muench, gmuench@cfa.harvard.edu, @augustmuench, Mercé Crosas, mcrosas@iq.harvard.edu, @mercecrosas,  Christopher Erdmann, cerdman@cfa.harvard.edu, @libcce)

Open-Source Visualization Tools  Glue  is an open-source Python-based tool that allows users to explore relationships amongst high-dimensional data sets, using linked-view visualization.  (contact: Christopher Beaumont, cbeaumont@cfa.harvard.edu, @BeaumontChris)

Free  Interactive “Universe Information System”  WorldWideTelescope (WWT) enables you to explore the universe, bringing together imagery from the best ground and space-based telescopes in the world and combining it with 3D navigation. (contacts: Jonathan Fay, jfay@microsoft.com, @astrojonathan and Curtis Wong, Curtis.Wong@microsoft.com, @WorldWideWong)

Collaborative Data Collection universe3d.org is a (working) pre-release of a website intended to connect astronomers and their data on their quest to map the Universe in three dimensions. As of now, it is a site intended to raise awareness of each other's data, and in the future, it will also display 3D data about what's in our Universe, using tools like WorldWide Telescope. (Contact: Alyssa Goodman, agoodman@cfa.harvard.edu, @aagie)