A fish-eye mosaic of the Milky Way arching across the night sky – about 100,000 light-years long. Credit: Bruno Gilli/ESO

The largest astronomical image ever made reveals 50,000 never-before-seen variable objects and the extent of the Milky Way. The image is so big that see it you’ll have to use the researchers online tool. Science Alert took the scoop.

On 21 October 2015, we finally made it to the future, according to Back to the Future.  NASA put away the hover boards and self-typing shoes for a minute to reflect on what a time traveller from 1985 would discover about NASA today?

We sure hear a lot about the north pole melting, but it’s a whole lot more useful to see how it’s happening.Despite the seasonal fluctuation, it’s clear from this Maps Mania featured map, that there are big changes happening.

Some very clever researchers highlighted by Forbes took open data from over 343,000 news articles published relating to refugees this year and turned it into a series of maps, depicting the paths of refugees over the world in real time throughout 2015.

How many trees are there in the world? 3,040,000,000,000… that’s how many. Find out how that figure was reached and what it means with Nature Journal’s video.

This month saw the discovery of water on Mars filling us with the hope of life on mars. This ESRI map story shows exactly how the discovery unfolded.

More on the bright side—quite literally—is the Sunshine map also featured by Maps Mania, which allows you to view the number of hours of sunshine across the globe for every month of the year.

Over at the HERE blog, visual artist Mychael Barratt explains how when he fell in love with London, his art naturally became historically inspired maps of the city.