Our Galaxy - The "Milky Way"
During Winter night skies we can look up into the night sky and see a milky band of light arching across the night sky. This milky band of light is in-fact the glow of light from millions of individual stars that occupy the galaxy in which we live, the Milky Way. The image (below) is a wide-field view of the band of light we see in the night sky. As you can see from the image, our Star the Sun is not alone, there are literally millions of other stars in this image alone. Aside from stars we can also see small reddish and bluish glows scattered across the sky, these are nebula. Dark nebula is responsible for the dominant dark lane running through the middle of the star field. A number of Clusters of Stars are present, along with a major cluster if stars at centre-right known as the Scutum Star Cloud.

This image cropped and reduced from original 3072x2048 image.
Exposures: 2 images stacked with Photoshop.
( 2 x 5 minute exposures).
Settings: RAW,3072x2048,ISO400,AWB,+1,+1,+1,Norm.
Seeing: Good.
Conditions: Poor (First Quarter Moon setting).