Measuring distances to the stars is one of the great challenges which continues to face experimental astronomy.
New techniques allow the visualisation of the sky in three-dimensions.
The audience will be able to see how stars move over periods of millions of years, with sequences illustrating the new insight that the Hipparcos data give us into the structure of our Galaxy, its age and formation processes, fields of recently discovered extra-solar planets, and stars which passed close to the Sun in the geologically recent past. The GAIA mission will build on the Hipparcos results to map the three-dimensional structure of more than one billion stars extending throughout our Galaxy.