Milky Way in southern hemisphere skies, TESS image mosaic. This mosaic of the southern sky was assembled from 208 images taken by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) during its first year of science operations, completed in July 2019. The mission divided the southern sky into 13 sectors, each of which was imaged for nearly a month by the spacecraft??? four cameras. Among the many notable celestial objects visible is the glowing band (left) of the Milky Way, our home galaxy seen edgewise, the Orion Nebula (top, a nursery for newborn stars), and the Large Magellanic Cloud (centre), a nearby galaxy located about 163,000 light years away. The prominent dark lines are gaps between the detectors in TESS's camera system.