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The revolutionary Gaia DR2 release on 25 April 2018 contained an amazing amount of information that is a challenge to visualize.

Simply displaying the stars would be worse than an image of a Sahara sandstorm. Fortunately, there is another alternative.

A technique called density isosurfaces is more commonly used to generate images from medical MRI scans.

In this technique we generate 3D surfaces consisting of a common density value, much like we can use contour lines on topographic maps to show regions of common elevation. In MRI scans this is human tissue density. For galaxy mapping we can use star density, counting the number of stars per cubic parsec. We can, in a way, use Gaia data to do an MRI scan of the Milky Way.

There is a crucial point about stars that affects mapping using this density technique.

This is that older cooler stars cannot be seen from a great distance, and tend to move around randomly from their place of birth. A random starscape does not give anything interesting to map.

So if you are going to make a large map, it often works better to focus on younger, hotter stars. These are usually closer to their birth places and can be seen for a long distance. And if you are going to make a smaller map, you can include cooler stars as well, but best to focus on large dense clumps as these will be closer to their birth places than a less dense random haze.

There is one major barrier to implementing this plan for larger maps, and that is dust. Dust can obscure and redden young hot stars and make them appear to be older cooler stars instead.

There was an attempt to provide information about reddening in the Gaia DR2 release, but it is not accurate enough for mapping. This is likely to be improved in future Gaia releases.

For this reason, astronomers have prepared special dereddened hot star subsets of the Gaia data set by adding additional information from other surveys. It turns out that infrared data is especially valuable in determining a star's true nature because infrared radiation is less affected by dust.