Parallel sessions

The ESA Gaia mission is creating a 3-D map of over a billion stars in our Milky Way and local Universe. The first Gaia Data Release was issued in September 2016 (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/dr1), whilst the second release is currently on the horizon (http://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/release).
This parallel session will provide a basic introduction to the Gaia mission, an overview of the catalogue contents including scientific quality and practical information on how to handle and access them from the Gaia archive for science research. The session will also look ahead as to what to expect from the second data release, which will see the release of positions, proper motions and parallaxes for well over 1 billion stars.