Milky Way
Also called: our galaxy, galactic plane.
Our home galaxy — and the faint band of light across a dark sky, which is its disk seen from inside.
The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy about 100,000 light-years across with a few hundred billion stars. The Sun sits in its disk, about 26,000 light-years from the centre, so we see the disk as a glowing band all around the sky, cut by dark lanes of dust.
The brightest part, towards the centre in Sagittarius and Scorpius, is highest on summer evenings from the northern hemisphere and on winter evenings from the southern. It needs a dark sky — it's invisible from most towns.
At the eyepiece
A dark site and fully dark-adapted eyes turn the Milky Way from a faint mist into a sky full of structure. Sweep it with binoculars.