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How do we have have pictures of our own Milky Way galaxy?

Are the pictures we have of the Milky Way galaxy (as a whole) real or just artists renderings of what we believe it looks like? If I am not mistaken, it would take over 100,000 light years just to reach the edge of our galaxy...do you see the problem here?

Public Comments

1. I drew them.
2. Satellite!!!! duh
3. duh there not real
4. wow. very interesting question. i have no idea. probably what we think it looks like, but i think we have a good idea of what it looks like so it's probably a pretty accurate computer graphic.
5. Aliens.
6. The only pictures we have are artist's drawings. Usually, real pictures you see are one's taken of distant galaxies said to look very similar to how they believe ours looks.
7. It's an artist's rendition cause we are in the Milky Way galaxy itself so there's no way the Hubble Telescope can capture the whole thing when it's actually in it.
8. It is possible to see the rest of the Milky Way, as it is a large "smear" across the sky... but no, there are no external views of the galaxy. Heck, the most distant human spacecraft is only just on the edge of the solar system.
9. We don't have any external shots of the Milky Way galaxy, for exactly the reason you stated; it would take a thousand lifetimes (at least!) to get a probe far enough away to photograph the entire thing from the outside, and then many more years for the light signal to return to Earth so we could see the pictures. When you see a picture of the "Milky Way galaxy" from well outside it, you're either seeing: (1) an artist's rendering, or (2) some other spiral galaxy that likely looks very much like our own galaxy from the outside. If the photograph is captioned as "the Milky Way galaxy", then the caption is misleading. The person who wrote the caption either didn't know why that picture couldn't possibly be our galaxy...or assumed that you wouldn't.
10. Nop they are all designed by computers....In order to take a good picture of the Milky Way we would have to go probably like 200,000 to 300,000 light years away....the further our satellite have been to is not even close to that...I beleive Voyager is about 2 light years away from Earth which is not even at the closest star(4.3 light years away)...so yeah there still a LOOOONG way to go.
11. We have seen all through other parts of our galaxy. Remember, we are SMALL. We are like...ants. We have even seen other galaxies. Scientists must make renderings based on other galaxies in relation to ours. :D
12. most are artists renderings the artist renderings are the ones where you can see the spiral of the galaxy and it looks like a circle. HOWEVER, the real pictures are the ones that make the Milky Way look like a flat disc. this is true because our solar system itself is near the edge of the galaxy. You might ask, "how to do you see the galaxy if you're in it?" Just imagine... if there's a lot of fog in your area, the place your standing seems that there isn't a lot of fog. but when you look up, you can't see a lot because more of the water particles (or in Galaxy terms, stars) look more clumped up together and thick.
13. A big friggin' mirror. It calls itself the Milky Way cuz it thinks it's fat. You'll never find intelligent life with that kind of talk
14. The same way we have pictures of the earth. Just because we live on (or in) it, doesn't prevent us from photographing it. We cannot photograph it like we can another galaxy -- from the outside. We photograph the galaxy from the inside, across the plane of it. If you live in a forest you can take pictures of the forest from the side and photograph many of the trees. What we cannot do is take an outside looking back photograph. So photographs of our own galaxy are relatively flat, not round/spiral. Also we can't photograph the stars on the opposite side of the galactic center.
15. Think of it this way: You can't take a picture of your house from inside. But if you see a house across the street that kinda looks like yours, you can say that picture shows a good representation of your house. That's how we get a picture to show what the milky way looks like. One galaxy often used is M100. Update: Some aren't reading the question. It's about a picture of the WHOLE galaxy, not our cross-section view of it from Earth. At light speed, it would take 100,000 years to cross it, but only 1,000 years to get to the closest ecliptic edge. Of course we can't go faster than a very small percentage of light speed so 100K years might be optimistic to cover 1,000ly.
16. Those photographs compose a mosaic of many photographs which are computer-processed.
17. paintings and drawings are not pictures
18. Take a remote sensing course. Satellites and telescopes have taken pictures of the Milky Way from inside the Milky Way for decades now. A good image processor can mosaic images of different areas of the sky together well enough that you can't see where the seams between the different images are. Somewhere in the caption you should be able to tell if something is an actual image/picture or if is an artistic rendering. On some web sites proper accreditation is not given.
19. This is fake (artist's rendering based on best available data) - http://casswww.ucsd.edu/public/tutorial/images/mw.jpg http://earthguide.ucsd.edu/eoc/teachers/t_universe/images/sig05-010a.jpg This is real (nice pictures towards the galactic core taken from earth) - http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0510/allskymilkyway_brunier_big.jpg http://www.macnmotion.com/milkyway/milkyway_08262008.jpg
20. i was like doing a fly by your galaxy ,..and took some gnarly pics and dropped off some copies for your scientists to use .
21. Remember the galaxy is a LOT older than 100,000 years. Billions of years is closer to the right age. The light we are receiving from the other side of the galaxy right now is how the galaxy appeared 70,000 years ago. So the images are from the past, before prehistory.