 But first, let's take a closer look at how an image like this is created. From orbit, we point the camera at the center of the galaxy and then turn it 180 degrees to face away from the center. We're now looking through the plane of the galaxy away from the center. Then we scan the camera clockwise, taking hundreds of pictures along the way. We continue the rotation through the center and all the way back to the starting point. Note that the stars on the right edge of the image, taken at the end of the rotation, are adjacent to the stars on the left edge of the image taken at the beginning. In other words, the entire right side of the image borders on the left. Now we rotate the camera up a bit and repeat the process. We do this over and over until the entire northern sky is covered. The last shot is taken with the camera pointing straight up perpendicular to the galactic plane. We then repeat the process for the southern sky and we have the entire picture. Once we have all the pictures covering the spherical surface of the sky all around us, we map it to a flat surface. There are a number of ways to do this. Astronomers use the elliptical projection method because it maintains the relative size and distance between celestial objects. You may have seen maps of the Earth that use this technique.