Our place in the galaxy
The Sun's position here is real, computed from a standard equatorial-to-Galactocentric transform, not assumed. The Milky Way's own spiral shape behind it is a labelled illustration -- we are inside the galaxy and cannot photograph its structure from outside. Every system plotted, and every detection-distance shell, comes from this catalogue's actual measured coordinates.
Where we are in the Milky Way
The spiral arms, central bar, and Orion Spur are drawn schematically — nobody has photographed the Milky Way from outside it — but the arm names and the barred structure are real, established from infrared star-count surveys (Benjamin et al. 2005, ApJ 630, L149), not invented for this illustration. The Sun's position is real: 8.18 kpc from the Galactic Centre (GRAVITY Collaboration (2019), A&A 625, L10), 20.8 pc above the midplane (Bennett & Bovy (2019), MNRAS 482, 1417). The dashed cyan ring marks the extent of the panel on the right — everything we've found so far is that small a fraction of the galaxy. The faint cyan dots are every one of the 6,327 systems in this catalogue, plotted at their real position — at this scale they sit almost on top of the Sun, which is itself the finding; use the + control above to zoom into the cluster and see it resolve. Zoomed in, one thin streak reaches toward the Galactic Centre — that is not planets being more common there. Percentage of each method's detections whose real sky position (not the Galactocentric transform) falls within 10 degrees of Sagittarius A*. High for microlensing because bulge-monitoring surveys point there by design, not because planets are physically more common in that direction. In this catalogue, 98.6% of Microlensing detections fall within 10° of Sagittarius A* on the real sky, against 0.1% for Transit and 1.3% for Radial Velocity — computed straight from each system's archive right ascension and declination, independent of the Galactocentric coordinates plotted above.
How far each method has actually reached
6,327 systemsThe furthest distance this catalogue actually contains a confirmed detection at, per method -- not a theoretical instrument sensitivity limit, which depends heavily on the target star's brightness and the planet's size. Radius is log-scaled (true 3-D distance from the Sun, same compression the 3-D map uses) so every shell stays legible at once; angle is each system's real projected direction.