>> 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.

I will admit I don't know much about the geometry of our galaxy, but I 
was under the impression that the disk is hundreds of billions of light 
years "thick", it's just that it's quadrillions of light years across as 
well. The point being, the disk is many million stars thick, and so we 
should see them in just about every direction we look.

>>> 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.

So... about 36 seconds of arc. Man, that's pretty small.

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