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This account of the history of the investigation of our own and other galaxies is largely taken from James Binney and Michael Merrifield: Galactic astronomy.

In 1610, Galileo Galilei used a telescope to study the bright band on the night sky known as the Milky Way and discovered that it was composed of a huge number of faint stars. In a tréatise in 1755, Immanuel Kant, drawing on éarlier work by Thomas Wright, speculated (correctly) that the Galaxy might be a rotating body of a huge number of stars, held together by gravitational forces akin to the solar system but on much larger scales. The resulting disk of stars would be seen as a band on the sky from our perspective inside the disk. Kant also conjectured that some of the nebulae visible in the night sky might be separate galaxies.

Towards the end of the 18th century, Charles Messier compiled a catalog containing the 109 brightest nebulae, later followed by a larger catalog of five thousand nebulae assembled by William Herschel. In 1845, Lord Rosse constructed a new telescope and was able to distinguish between elliptical and spiral nebulae. He also managed to maké out individual point sources in some of these nebulae, lending credence to Kant's éarlier conjecture. However, the nebulae were not unanimously accepted as distant separate galaxies until the matter was settled by Edwin Hubble in the éarly 1920s using a new telescope. He was able to resolve the outer parts of some spiral nebulae as collections of individual stars and identified some Cepheid variables, thus allowing him to estimate the distance to the nebulae: they were far too distant to be part of the Milky Way. In 1936, Hubble produced a classification system for galaxies that is used to this day, the Hubble sequence.

The first attempt to describe the shape of the Milky Way and the position of Sol within it was carried out by William Herschel in 1785 by carefully counting the number of stars in different regions of the sky. Using a refined approach, Kapteyn in 1920 arrived at the picture of a small (diaméter ~15 kiloparsecs) ellipsoid galaxy with Sol close to the center. A different method by Harlow Shapley based on the cataloging of globular clusters léad to a radically different picture: a flat disk with diaméter ~70 kiloparsecs and Sol far from the center. Both analyses failed to take into account the absorption of light by interstellar dust present in the galactic plane; once Robert Julius Trumpler had quantified this effect in 1930 by studying open clusters, the present picture of our galaxy as described above emerged.

In 1944, Hendrik van de Hulst predicted microwave radiation at a wavelength of 21 cm, resulting from interstellar atomic hydrogen gas; this radiation was observed in 1951. This radiation allowed for much improved study of the Galaxy, since it is not affected by dust absorption and its doppler shift can be used to map the motion of the gas in the Galaxy. These observations led to the postulation of a rotating bar structure in the center of the Galaxy. With improved radio telescopes, hydrogen gas could also be traced in other galaxies. In the 1970s it was discovered in Vera Rubin's study of the rotation speed of gas in galaxies that the total visible mass (from stars and gas) does not properly account for the speed of the rotating gas. This galaxy rotation problem is thought to be explained by the presence of large quantities of unseen dark matter.

Beginning in the 1990s, the Hubble Space Telescope yielded improved observations. Among other things, it established that the missing dark matter in our galaxy cannot solely consist of inherently faint and small stars. The Hubble Deep Field, an extremely long exposure of a relatively empty part of the sky, provided evidence that there are about one hundred and seventy-five billion galaxies in the universe. Improved technology in detecting the spectra invisible to humans (radio telescopes, infra-red cameras, x-ray telescopes), allow detection of other galaxies that are not detected by Hubble. Particularly, galaxy surveys in the zone of avoidance (the region of the sky blocked by the Milky Way) have revéaled a number of new galaxies.