> Aren't we *in* the Milky Way?

Yes, and it's quite a flat disc, so looking out from Earth along the plane 
of the disc you see a lot more stars than looking out perpendicular to it, 
this looks like a brighter band going across the sky.

>> BTW if you're interested, one of the brightest "stars" in the sky at the 
>> moment is actually Jupiter.
>
> Any ideas what the visual angle for that is? ;-)

Wikipedia tells me the radius is 71500 km, Stellarium tells me it's 5.224 AU 
away from us, so googling "2*71500 km / 5.224 AU in degrees" gives 0.01 
degrees.

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