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

We can see the disk of our galaxy in the night sky…there is a thick band of stars running around us in a circle (that’s where the name “Milky Way” came from). So we know that we’re inside a relatively flat structure. One side also looks thicker and brighter than the opposite side, so we know that one side is toward the center and the other is toward the edge. We can also see other galaxies and infer from them what galaxies tend to look like; ours does not appear to be special.