New Insight into the Bar in the Center of the Milky Way

The BRAVA fields are shown in this image montage. For reference, the center of the Milky Way is at coordinates L= 0, B=0. The regions observed are marked with colored circles. This montage includes the southern Milky Way all the way to the horizon, as seen from CTIO. The telescope in silhouette is the CTIO Blanco 4-m. (Just peaking over the horizon on the left is the Large Magellanic Cloud, the nearest external galaxy to our own.)