Think about it. We have launched these technological mirrors into our orbit. The Hubble space telescope fucking far enough in space they took a picture of the milky way galaxy. Holy fuck. And our galaxy is huge. Inspired by a space thread while baked. Sent from my LGMS769 using Grasscity Forum mobile app
How did we find out what our galaxy looks like? and how did we find out where we are in it. Like in a milky way picture an anstronomer or whatever could point out where we are in the milky way. How is that
By observing everything around us. You can understand a lot about shape, orientation, and distance with enough data And op if you think seeing the end of our galaxy is impressive, we've seen light with hubble almost 13billion light years away, nearly as old as the universe itself.
The Hubble space telescope is orbiting earth, in our solar system. We have no pictures of the entire milky way galaxy taken from outside it. The pictures we can take of the milky way are cross sections. They look like this:   The images that show the milky way looking like a spiral that's all in the frame are constructions.  ^not a real photo. Concept constructed by NASA of what it looks like in 2008 We can take photos that look like that of any other spiral galaxy that is facing us disk-on (like the whirlpool and pinwheel galaxies):  Galaxies that face us edge on (like the needle galaxy and the sombrero galaxy) look like this: