Although our telescopes have captured some truly stunning images of the Milky Way, astronomers have only a vague understanding of our home galaxy. It took a lot of work even to get that sketch, and it's amazing what we've been able to learn from our limited vantage point.
Here on Earth's surface, the Milky Way galaxy appears to the naked eye as a nebulous band across the sky. While astronomers and philosophers have debated the true nature and location of the Milky Way for ages, the great astronomer, physicist and all-around genius Galileo Galilei was the first to discover the galaxy's true nature: countless stars so small that their light blends together. In the mid-1700s, philosopher Immanuel Kant correctly guessed that the Milky Way was a rotating disk of stars, and because we were embedded in that disk, it appeared as a band to us. A few decades later, astronomer William Herschel attempted to create a map of the universe, with little success.
