04/08/11 – Ephemeris – Looking out the thin side of the Milky Way
Friday, April 8th. The sun will rise at 7:11. It’ll be up for 13 hours and 7 minutes, setting at 8:18. The moon, 3 days before first quarter, will set at 1:39 tomorrow morning.
In winter and summer we see the Milky Way crossing the sky from north to south. In the autumn we see it cross nearly overhead from east to west. In the spring, especially next month the Milky way is barely visible low in the north. The Milky Way circles the sky as a great circle. It is what we see of our own galaxy. It is a spiral galaxy 100,000 light years in diameter and less than 5,000 light years thick where we are. So in the spring we look out the thin side of our galaxy. The stars are sparser than in other parts of the sky, the constellations generally are larger. The really cool part is that in telescopes we can see other galaxies, other Milky Ways beyond. In the spring we have a huge cluster of thousands of galaxies out there about 50 million light years away.
* Times are for the Traverse City/Interlochen area of Michigan. They may be different for your location.
Addendum
Looking out the thin side of the Milky Way. Created using Cartes duCiel
This is the entire dome of the sky on May 15th at 11 p.m. Note the Milky Way ringing the horizon. The red dots are galaxies, the blue and gray dots are star clusters in our galaxy, the green ones are nebulae, also in our galaxy.
Bob Moler's Ephemeris Blog 
The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy which is the home of our Solar System . Compared with other galaxies the Milky Way is very large – its mass is . Our Sun one of many stars in our Milky Way Galaxy completes a circuit .
….the luminous region is surrounded by an extensive invisible dark halo.the dark halo contains most of the mass of the Milky Way in the form of invisible.Dark Matter….Dark Matter. ..The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy…The Milky Way is subdivided into a galactic bulge a disk and a halo…Globular clusters inhabit the halo…Population I and population II stars appear in different regions…Dark matter makes up a large fraction of the matter in the Milky Way…We cannot see the center of the Milky Way with visible light but infrared radio x-rays and gamma-rays reveal its features…It is likely that a giant 4 000 000 solar masses black hole lives at the Milky Ways center…Solar System sun and planets orbits Milky Way every 225 000 000 years…Arms of spiral galaxies are bright and bluish largely due to brightest stars O B .as well as emission nebulae…The Milky Way was formed by the collapse of a large region of gas and dust…