Have you ever been lucky enough to be away from the city lights at night and seen The Milky Way in all it's glory? At
first glance you might think it's a band of clouds. But if you take a good look, you start to realize it's actually a billion
stars! The Milky Way is our home galaxy. If you could see it from a greater distance, it would look like a typical spiral
galaxy, essentially a flat disk of stars with curving arms. Our (Earth's) location within the Milky Way is actually near it's
edge within one of those arms. When we look up at the Milky Way, we are actually looking toward the center of our galaxy.
Our Milky Way galaxy is not the only one out there. There are actually billions of other galaxies in the universe. Some
of them are relatively close to our own so they look larger in my images. These closer galaxies are part of the "Local Group"
of galaxies which includes the Milky Way. There are many of these galactic clusters strewn throughout the universe.
