Myth of the Milky Way Galaxy

[Matthew]

Do we live in a galaxy? Maybe.
Is it a fact? If you ask me, the answer would be no.

When I look up at the night sky on a really clear night in the deep countryside the best I can hope to see is this:

[Matthew]

But in magazines, newspapers, textbooks, science articles and journals, on TV shows like Nova, or National Geographic, etc, what we are usually shown is something like this:

[Maria]

I have seen the Milky Way pictured in these dramatic photos in real life, but one must be away from city lights.

My dad was an astrophysicist and astronomer. He took us to Mt. Shasta, to many mountain camp grounds, and other deserted areas where no city lights would ruin the view of the Milky Way. We also visited several observatories like the one at the Great Continental Divide in Colorado. In fact, my dad would arrange his vacations to coincide with some of his scientific presentations, so that we got to visit quite a few observatories and scientific institutions.

Seeing the Milky Way out in the open country far from civilization is so very different than poking one's head outside the house on a city block with city street lighting.

[Matthew]

When I was growing up I even had this image on my wall in a huge poster I got at a museum gift shop I went to that said, "The Milky Way Galaxy":

[Matthew]

I have also seen other photos of the "milky way" like this one:

[Matthew]

One day I realised that they couldn't really be photos of the Milky Way, indeed, there could not be any photos of the Milky Way because no man-made objects have been sent out of the solar system. They are all "examples" of what they guess our galaxy "must" look like. Or they are computer generated "artist's impressions" of what it looks like. Then one day I asked myself, in what universe could our planet be located that close to a huge superdense ball of billions and trillions of suns clustered together like that and all we see is this wee little band of spilt sugar on the night sky?

[Matthew]

Well, the answer is simply, "Obviously not in my universe."

When we have never once had direct visual evidence that we live anywhere near such a cosmic structure the claims made about the existence of the Milky Way are really fraudulent. Look at the outright imaginative guesstimating and fudging that pretends to be science fact as it is presented in thousands of "authoritative" textbooks in schools, magazines, and educational TV shows: -- and remember -- NONE Of these are REAL evidence of the Milky Way spiral Galaxy that we supposedly live in as a rock solid fact because every single one of them is either a photo or "artist's conception" of some distant galaxy like M31 (aka Andromeda), ESO 510-G13, M63 (aka Sunflower), M64 (Black Eye), or my favourite, M104 (aka Sombrero Galaxy):