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This story will display in ... Google has just released a new, interactive star map that allows you to point, click and zoom your way around our local volume of galactic space. 100,000 Stars has detailed information on dozens of nearby stars, including accurate, 3D animations of binary stars orbiting each other and close-ups of the superheated filaments rearing up from the surface on the surface of our own sun.
The Google Creative Lab team that developed this awesome map writes:

Visualizing the exact location of every star in the galaxy is a problem of, well, galactic proportions. With over 200 billion stars, capturing every detail of the Milky Way currently defies scientists and laptops alike. However, using imagery and data from a range of sources, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), we were recently able to take one small step in that direction by plotting the location of the stars closest to our sun . . . The experiment makes use of Google Chrome's support for WebGL, CSS3D, and Web Audio. Music was generously provided by Sam Hulick, who video game fans may recognize as a composer for the popular space adventure series, Mass Effect.

Remember this is an artistic representation of the galaxy, so not every single thing you see is perfectly accurate — especially the close-up views of the surfaces of nearby stars.
To view 100,000 Stars, you have to use a Chrome browser. Start by clicking "play" to see an introduction to the app — and then have fun for the rest of the day, learning about our galactic neighborhood!

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Scientists may have glimpsed the most distant galaxy ever seen. The galaxy, known as MACS0647-JD, appeared as a tiny dot behind an enormous galactic cluster that lies between the Big and Little Dipper.
Scientists combined data from the Hubble space telescope with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope to make the discovery. MACS0647-JD would have existed about 13.3 billion years ago, or roughly 420 million years after the Big Bang. This would place it around 200 million years earlier than previous candidates for most distance object ever spotted.
The galaxy cluster in front of MACS0647-JD helped scientists to see it, since the gargantuan gravitational pull of the cluster bends light around it. This creates a gravitational lens that makes distant objects appear much brighter than they otherwise would. If the existence of MACS0647-JD is confirmed, it would help scientists understand how the universe appeared when the first stars and galaxies formed.
The galaxy is small, appearing to be about 600 light-years across, or 250 times smaller than our Milky Way. Small, early galaxies are thought to have crashed into one another and combined over billions of years to form the enormous cosmic structure we see in the present-day universe.
But because the galaxy is stretching Hubble’s and Spitzer’s abilities, it may actually be much closer. Other current telescopes can’t really confirm its existence but NASA’s future James Webb Space Telescope, set to launch in 2018, could definitively determine how far it is to MACS0647-JD.