[ THREAD ]
We spend a lot of time looking out into the universe.
With the help of space telescopes like Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer we see beautiful images of other galaxies and nebulae.
Buuuuut what about the Milky Way?
You've NEVER seen a photo of it in whole.
Here's why.

Turns out it is a whole lot easier to photograph objects outside of our galaxy then our own home.

Imagine trying to take a photo of the outside of your house but you can't go outside.
Yup. Things start getting creative.

With that image in your head.
The awesome astrophotography you see people share of the Milky Way or if you look up at night and see that beautiful stripe of stars in the sky.
That is kinda like looking up at our ceiling.
We are looking from the inside.

The added thing is, from where we are we cant even see all the way out of the milky way. Our view is blocked by dust, both in clouds and diffuse dust.
We can only see about 1,000 -2,000 light years in any direction, even though our galaxy is a 100,000 light years across.

So this is what we have done to research the Milky Way and get photos of it.

Large earth telescopes take a series of photos of the milky way while rotating on Earth and stitch them together creating kind of a panorama of sorts.

This gives us an idea what the Milky Way looks like. But remember this is and image of this inside stretched out to look like a plane view of the disks. Which gives us a good idea. But not actually what it looks like from the outside.

Another way we can visualize the Milky Way is with computer renders. We can take the data we have of our galaxy and compile it and make images like this one.

Also another thing that this limits us with is knowing what colors the Milky Way contains. Just recently scientist confirmed what color the Milky Way would look like from a distance.
And guess what. A hazy white.

This had nothing to do with the name Milky Way.
Our eyes can only see specific spectrum of light and colors. So to us the Milky Way to the naked eye looks mostly white in the sky. But it actually as A LOT more color then what we can see.

How we view other galaxies is by color and temperature. So when trying to figure out what ours looks like the problem is similar to determining the overall color of the Earth when you're only able to tell what Pennsylvania looks like.

To sidestep this problem, astronomers decided to look at other galaxies' colors to figure out the hue of our own. The reasoning is that galaxies whose other properties closely match the Milky Way's likely can tell us what our galaxy's color is.

They try to match Black Hole size, mount of stars and the rate at which they are creating new stars, both related to the brightness and color of a galaxy. Like our galaxy sisters.

And that my space friends is how we know what our own galaxy looks like, well mostly.

What do you guys think about all of this. Have any questions or if you want to add anything to this thread feel free.