From dark sky sites on Earth, the Milky Way appears as a glowing band stretching across the sky. To astronomers, it is a disk stretching across 100,000 light years seen edge on from our vantage point. A new catalogue of the visible part of the northern part of the Milky Way galaxy has been assembled and it includes no fewer than 219 million stars. Geert Barentsen of the University of Hertfordshire in the UK led the team who assembled the catalogue in a ten year program using the Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma in the Canary Islands.