Silently one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.

—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

With Galileo's discovery that the Milky Way (our galaxy) consists
of countless bright tiny dots (which he correctly interpreted as stars
at vast distances) astronomy took its first step beyond the naked‐
eye stars that seem to fill the sky every moonless night. But until
large, optically accurate telescopes were constructed nothing be-
yond Galileo's speculations about the dynamics and structure of
the Milky Way could be deduced nor could Galileo's speculations
be confirmed. But this did not deter people who gloried in observ-
ing the stars with their unaided eyes from drawing conclusions
about what they saw. Thus, as previously noted, Thomas Wright,
a sailor, whose own travels had acquainted him thoroughly with
the visible stars and the Milky Way, proposed in 1740 that the Milky
Way was, indeed, a collection of stars. Wright concluded that the
stars around us in the sky are not distributed equally in all direc-
tions and throughout all of space but are concentrated in a rela-
tively thin band, and that our sun is a member of this remarkable
collection of stars.

He correctly concluded that the way the stellar distribution ap-
pears to us is due to the fact that we are within that distribution
and see the nearby naked-eye stars as all around us and the very
distant stars as forming a band that we call the "Milky Way." He
went on to conclude that we do not see any distant stars (points
of light in the form of a band) in a direction 90 degrees away from
the direction to the Milky Way because there are no such stars. In
short, our stellar system is not spherical in shape but more like a
pancake.

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