The Milky Way is Earth's own galaxy. It appears as a band of faint light across the sky, visible to the naked eye on moonless nights, and consists of stars, dust and gas. This picture of the whole sky reveals how the Milky Way looks at infrared wavelengths. The bright yellow band is the infrared radiation from warm interstellar dust in the galactic plane. The bulge in the middle is the center of the galaxy. The reddish wisps are star-forming regions and dust ejected from the plane by hot stars. The blue S-shapes swirl is caused by the dusty remains of recent comets within the solar system.