At night we see many points of light in the sky that come from stars much more distant than our own Sun. On a clear dark night, though, in the absence of the Moon, we can see a hazy band of light formed by stars that can’t individually be seen by the naked eye. This band is called the Milky Way. In fact, what we are seeing is a small part of a collection of more than one hundred billion stars called the Milky Way Galaxy. This galaxy is a flattened system (like a thick pancake) known as a spiral galaxy and the reason that it appears as a band is because the Earth is embedded in the flattened region of our galaxy.
