If we are inside the galaxy, how is the image of the galaxy taken from the outside?

Galaxy

Searching for images of the Milky Way on the Internet, you'll find all sorts of images: bright shadows across the night sky with advanced cameras, bright images of galaxies taken by powerful telescopes, and finally a spiral/spiral full galaxy! Oh, what did you say ?! Pictures of full galaxies ?! If we were inside the Milky Way, how would we picture our entire Milky Way? As I said before, we never did. We don't have any real pictures of the complete Milky Way!

This is not the Milky Way. It is actually a normal spiral galaxy in NGC 4414, the constellation Coma Berenices, about 55,000 light-years in diameter and about 60 million light-years from Earth.

Galaxy

The Earth is located on the Milky Way, but it is nowhere near its center. We are about 25,000 light-years from the center's supermassive black hole and about 25,000 light-years from the outer edge. As Matt Williams wrote in Universe Today, if the Milky Way was a vinyl record (call song record), we would be in a groove between the center and the edge. The galaxy itself is shaped like a disk, the center part is slightly swollen and the shape is slightly distorted due to the pull of nearby galaxies.

If you go to a dark, light-pollution-free area, you'll see a glittering band line across the night sky. It can be called the crossroads of the Milky Way. (In a metaphorical sense, if you were to sit on the outer edge of a vinyl record, you would see it not as a circle, but as a flat line. This also applies to our galaxy). But this is from the surface of the earth. What would it look like from a spaceship?

Subhasish Thakur Photography

Voyager 1 is the longest-distance spacecraft from Earth. Voyager 1 was 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth in 2016, the 40th anniversary of its launch. From this point of view, one light-year is about 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers), and the thickness of our Milky Way is 1,000 light-years. So it can be said with certainty that it will never leave the Milky Way in our lifetime.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t see some great pictures of the Milky Way in our lifetime. . Powerful telescopes, such as the Hubble, the Moon, and the Spitzer, capture different pieces of our galaxy at different wavelengths of light, which astronomers combine to create a complete picture of our galaxy as far as possible. And those telescopes can see other galaxies completely. By covering the shapes of other galaxies and fragmentary images of our Milky Way, artists create an acceptable picture of what our galaxy actually looks like.

Galaxy

Thus, you have seen the Milky Way which is a lot like seeing living dinosaurs. No one has ever seen dinosaurs with their own eyes, but decades of research have enabled them to make a perfect and accurate guess about what dinosaurs look like.