text: We can see part of the Milky Way in the night sky, but what it looks like is a band of stars since we are seeing it from the "side".   There isn't an actual picture of the Milky Way from the "top", so the pictures you see are really simulations or projections based on what we know... We can make a good guess of what it looks like since we know the distances to many of the stars within our galaxy, and if we start plotting them, we can make an estimate of what our galaxy must look like from afar.  There's a great drawing of what some leading astronomers now think the Milky Way looks like:  http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050825.html\n\nOn your question about planets, we can actually see all of the planets we know of with telescopes (on earth and in space... like the hubble telescope).  But some of the really distant planets are still hard to see from earth.  But we've also sent out several deep space probes that have passed nearby most the planets where we've been able to take great pictures.