According to Greek religion the diffused band of light seen in the night sky is the milk squirted from her breasts across the heaven. This is the origin of the phrase ' milky way ' we use today

In our own galaxy there are between 100 to 400 billion stars.  But at night you can see 2500 stars just with the naked eye (and if there is no light pollution).  Currently, we can’t take a picture of the Milky Way from above.

This is due to the fact that we are inside the galactic disk, about 26,000 light years from the galactic center. It would be like trying to take a picture of your own house from the inside.

This means that any of the beautiful pictures you’ve ever seen of a spiral galaxy that is supposedly the Milky Way is either a picture of another spiral galaxy, or the rendering of a talented artist.

In fact in the 1990s, there was a massive power outage in California and the residents of Los Angeles actually started to worry about the strange clouds they saw overhead. As it turns out, they were actually seeing the Milky Way for the first time.

1. In China, the Milky Way is called “The Silver River.” In ancient Chinese myth, the river was placed in the heavens by the gods trying to separate a weaver who made their clothes and the herdsman who loved her.
2. The Romans called our galaxy the Milky Road because it reminded them of milk. The Greeks called it the Milky Circle. In fact, the word “galaxy” is from the Greek word for milk.
3. In Greek mythology, the Milky Way was created when Hera spilled her milk while suckling Heracles. It was also described as the road to Mount Olympus, or the path of ruin made by the Helios’ (the sun god’s) chariot.
4. In Sanskrit, the Milky Way is called Akash Ganga, or “Ganges of the heavens.”
5. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus, who lived from about 460 to 370 B.C., was the first known person to suggest that the Milky Way is made of stars. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) was the first to identify and resolve the band of light as many individual stars with his telescope in 1610.
6. Visible light, the light we can see, is only one form of energy given off by stars and other objects in the Milky Way. Our galaxy also consists of other types of energy, such as infrared light, radio waves, gamma rays, dark matter, and X-rays.
7. When a person sees the Milky Way at night, they are seeing only about 0.0000025% of the galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars.
8. The very center of the Milky Way contains a powerful gravitational force that scientists believe is a black hole, which they have named Sagittarius A*. Astronomers believe this black hole weighs as much as 4 million of our suns put together.
9. The Milky Way is a galaxy—a huge group of stars, gas, dust, and other matter held together in space by their mutual gravitational pull. The Milky Way is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe.
10. The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy that has curved arms that spin out from its center. Astronomers discovered it was barred (meaning the center is bar-shaped) rather than an ordinary spiral galaxy (meaning the center is a spherical bulge) in the 1990s. It is 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-interesting-facts-about-the-Milky-Way