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We have pictured the celestial sphere as being more or less randomly sprinkled with stars. Try looking at the sky on a very clear and moonless night. You might be able to detect a swatch of cloudiness across the entire sky. This is the Milky Way. A good way of spotting it is to look for a large "W" of stars circling around Polaris. This "W" is the constellation Cassiopeia and the Milky Way runs right through it. It is al sometimes easier to spot the Milky Way or any other dim object through the corner of your eye and not by looking straight at it. The "cloud" of the Milky Way is actually thousands of distant stars that make up our home galaxy. Our galaxy is shaped roughly like two automobile hubcaps attached together so that the center bulges out while the edges are quite thin. Our Sun is located in the suburbs on the edge, as are most of the stars we see in the sky. Most of the stars of our galaxy are located in the direction of the faint light of the Milky Way. All told, the galaxy has about 100 billion stars. The line on the celestial sphere, which indicates the path of the Milky Way, is called the galactic equator.