For more information on the panorama, click here. We also see the combined glow of millions of fainter, distant disk stars too faint to resolve individually. The Milky Way is less conspicuous toward Auriga because the density of matter in the disk falls off with distance from the center. When we look perpendicular to the Galactic plane, we see few stars. These directions are free of dust, and here we can therefore see out of our Galaxy into extragalactic space .
Dust obscures our view of the central part of the Milky Way at visible wavelengths.
However, infrared telescopes can penetrate the dust haze, since dust has less effect on infrared light. Here we can see the bulge and inner disk of the galaxy without interference from dust. 130 Lab No. 6. M33 is quite faint, but M31 is readily visible on a dark night. We have found that there are over 1 billion galaxies within reach of our best telescopes.