eli5 How do we know how our galaxy looks like if we’re part of it ?

Question

We can only see ourselves if we look in the mirror or our photos or like we can see how our planet looks because of the satellites . But how can we see our galaxy

In: 10

Answer 1

antithesys’s answer is great. I just want to emphasize that, just as you suspected: **We can’t** see our galaxy. We are inside it, and nothing ever launched by humans has come even close to leaving it. So we have no photos of it, you’d have to be outside for that. Any image you have seen of “The Milky Way” is not a photo, it’s a drawing or computer model of what we think it *must* look like from outside, based on what we can see by looking out in different directions from inside it.