I recently learned of some research reported in late 2015 about some surprises about the local structure of the Milky Way which were discovered in the Hipparcos data:
http://sci.esa.int/hipparcos/56834-anot ... hitecture/An interactive 3D display is available at
http://sci.esa.int/hipparcos/ob-stars-interactive-hr/Unfortunately, manipulating it is painfully slow on my computer, so I thought I'd try to represent some of the information in Celestia.
Below is a very preliminary result showing the spatial density of all of the B class stars in Celestia's database. Marks are colored red for the lowest density and white for the highest density, with intermediate values in yellow.
It shows at least one feature reported in the article referenced above: there's a trail of B stars between the Sun (in the center) and the Orion Nebula (near the lower edge). I dunno what the clumps toward the upper right might be associated with.
There are some other objects visible in this view. For example, pulsars are white crosses scattered across the image. The different types of symbols aren't really distinguishable at this resolution. I scaled down a 1920x1080 screengrab to 720x405.
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