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The Milky Way is a band in the sky that is visible in the clear dark night sky. It appears like silverish shimmering clouds arranged in a long band along a great circle in the sky.

With binoculars it is easily visible that it consists of millions of stars and occasionally bright or dark nebulae in between them.

By measuring distances to these stars and nebulae, modern astrophysics found out that the 3D-structure of this agglomeration of stars is a huge flat spiral. Seen from the top, it would look like a plate with the center thicker than the edges.