About this map
Edenhofer et al. (2024) reconstruct the differential dust extinction in a 1.25 kpc volume around the Sun from ~54 million stellar extinctions (Zhang, Green & Rix 2023: Gaia XP + 2MASS + WISE) using a Gaussian-process information-field-theory inversion on a HEALPix Nside = 256 (NEST) grid with 516 logarithmically spaced distance shells from 69 pc to 1250 pc. The full cube is ~10⁹ voxels; this build ships the cube resampled onto a dense 256³ Cartesian grid at 1 byte/voxel (uint8 normalised log-density, raymarched as a 3D texture) rather than as a filtered point cloud. That grid is 9.77 pc per voxel, considerably coarser than the source reconstruction (0.28 pc at 69 pc, 5 pc at 1250 pc), for the browser.
Four structural overlays sit on top of the dust:
local-bubble-shell.json.Reading the map
The Sun is at the origin. Density mode renders voxels in the gold→white extinction palette — colour saturates at ρ = 10⁻¹ mag/pc (cloud cores) and fades through ρ = 10⁻³ mag/pc (typical cirrus). Distance mode colours by heliocentric radius from blue (close) to red (1.25 kpc). Altitude colours by |z|, exposing the Radcliffe Wave's vertical undulation against the otherwise plane-confined molecular disc. The density-threshold slider mutates an instance-vis attribute and re-renders without re-uploading geometry; the radius cap does the same on heliocentric distance.
The "Along Radcliffe" view drops the camera into the local-arm direction and aligns up-vector with the Wave's mean plane — the most direct demonstration that the chain of clouds does oscillate, not just lie tilted.
What this isn't
This is the local volume. The Edenhofer cube stops at 1.25 kpc; beyond that, the right product is Bayestar19 (Green et al. 2019) for the rest of the Northern sky out to ~7 kpc, with the Vergely et al. 2022 EXPLORE map filling the 1–3 kpc disk. None of the available 3D dustmaps cover the full Milky Way disk at uniform resolution — anyone showing one is interpolating, not measuring.
mean_and_std_healpix.fits from 10.5281/zenodo.10658339, MEAN HDU only, density-filtered and Cartesian-projected by Data/edenhofer-dustmap/build_map.py. Local Bubble overlay: spherical-harmonic expansion from Data/sun-local-bubble/local-bubble-shell.json. Wave / clouds / Per-Tau overlays: parametric, anchored on the references below. Source unit on the cube is differential extinction in the Zhang, Green & Rix (2023) unit-extinction system, E_ZGR23 per parsec — not A_V and not E(B−V). To read these numbers as visual extinction, multiply by roughly 2.8: the 10⁻¹ saturation point corresponds to A_V ≈ 0.28 mag/pc.
References
- Edenhofer, Zucker, Frank, Saydjari, Speagle, Finkbeiner & Ensslin (2024) — "A parsec-scale Galactic 3D dust map out to 1.25 kpc from the Sun." A&A 685, A82. arXiv:2308.01295. The reconstruction.
- Zhang, Green & Rix (2023) — "Parameters of 220 million stars from Gaia BP/RP spectra." MNRAS 524, 1855. The stellar extinction catalogue feeding Edenhofer's inversion.
- Pelgrims, Ferrière, Boulanger, Lallement & Casandjian (2020) — "Modeling the inside-out shape of the Local Bubble." A&A 636, A17. Local Bubble shell.
- Alves, Zucker, Goodman, Speagle, Meingast, Robitaille, Finkbeiner, Schlafly & Green (2020) — "A Galactic-scale gas wave in the solar neighbourhood." Nature 578, 237. Radcliffe Wave discovery.
- Konietzka, Goodman, Alves, et al. (2024) — "The Radcliffe Wave is oscillating." Nature 628, 62. Wave is dynamically oscillating, not static.
- Zucker, Speagle, Schlafly, Green, Finkbeiner, Goodman & Alves (2020) — "A compendium of distances to molecular clouds in the Star Formation Handbook." A&A 633, A51. Named cloud distances.
- Bialy, Zucker, Goodman, et al. (2021) — "The Per-Tau Shell." ApJL 919, L5. Supershell coordinating Perseus + Taurus star formation.
- Leike & Enßlin (2020) — "Reconstruction of the local dust density on parsec scales." A&A 631, A32. The 400 pc precursor to Edenhofer.
- Lallement, Babusiaux, Vergely, et al. (2019) — "Gaia-2MASS 3D maps of Galactic interstellar dust within 3 kpc." A&A 625, A135. Predecessor map at 25 pc resolution.
- Vergely, Lallement & Cox (2022) — "Three-dimensional extinction maps: inverting Gaia DR2 photometry." A&A 664, A174. 3 kpc extension at 10 pc near the plane.
- Green, Schlafly, Zucker, Speagle & Finkbeiner (2019) — "A 3D dust map based on Gaia, Pan-STARRS 1, and 2MASS." ApJ 887, 93. Bayestar19, the 7 kpc complement.