Queen guitarist Sir Brian May's latest book explores the history, mystery and evolution of galaxies in a way never tried before – through 3D photography that takes years of painstaking work to create.

Many of us have looked at images of the galaxies around us and been overawed by the vastness of the Universe they hint at.

Seeing in 3D

The images in this article are from Islands in Infinity: Galaxies 3D, and can be viewed in stereo with a special viewer.

If you happen to have a viewer at home, you can see the images in this story in 3D too. Hold the viewer in front of your eyes about 10-15cm (4-6in) from the screen. Don't squint; just relax your eyes. After a few moments the pictures should start to change.

Ever-more-powerful telescopes – including some floating in orbit – have allowed us to see further and further into the dark gulf of space, showing huge, far-off galaxies that were previously invisible to human eyes.

But as impressive as these images are, they can't convey the true scale. A two-dimensional image – no matter how impressive the device that took it – cannot show the breadth and depth of the billions of stars and cosmic gases contained in it.

That is, until now.

A trio of self-confessed astronomy nerds – Queen guitarist Sir Brian May, physicist Derek Ward-Thompson and astro-photographer J-P Metsavainio – set out to show what these galaxies might look like if you were somehow able to peer at them with eyes many, many light years apart.

Sir Brian is a long-standing devotee of stereo photography (which renders two almost identical images in three dimensions through a special viewing device) as well as a doctor of astrophysics (a degree he completed in 2007, decades after dropping his Imperial College London studies in favour of Queen.) He has produced several stereo photography books on space exploration and the mysteries of the cosmos through his publisher The London Stereoscopic Company.

Each of the books, such as Mission Moon 3D or Cosmic Clouds, has narrowed its focus on an aspect of space exploration or the cosmos surrounding us. But for this book, Islands in Infinity: Galaxies 3D, Sir Brian and his collaborators widened their lens, looking at the hundreds of millions of galaxies that we share the Universe with.

Sir Brian, alongside Ward-Thompson and Metsaivanio, launched the book at an event in London's Notting Hill in mid-November, presenting a lecture on some of the galaxies featured in the book and projecting some of Metsaivanio's three-dimensional images.

"We did a book called Cosmic Clouds, which was bringing the clouds of dust and gas in our own galaxy to life," Sir Brian tells the BBC ahead of the launch. "And that's not something anyone can do except J-P… having done that, where do we go next? Well, we go outside the galaxy, we go to other galaxies, we look at all galaxies in the Universe, and we engaged one of the world's foremost experts in galactic evolution, who's sitting right beside you."

War-Thompson says with a chuckle: "I wouldn't go quite that far, but I have been studying them for 40 years. I did point out that one of the galaxies in the book........

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