How can we get pictures from a far vantage point of the Milky Way when our telescopes are inside the galaxy?
481724
We do not.  Every single "picture" of the Milky way (other than the view into the galaxy from earth) is either a picture made by someone, or an image of another galaxy that we feel looks a lot like what we have determined outs looks like.\n\nThis is actually a big misconception, and I wish that textbooks, and other books showing images of galaxies would make more of a point in labling things "artist's conception" or some other designator.
949796
Google earth has the closest thing with a 3D view on some popular locations, like NYC and the Vatican.\n\nThe best answer is none, because all satellites take pictures looking straight down.  At 23 miles up just about everything looks like you are looking straight down.
1047988
Not that I know of. If there were, I'm sure it would cost a lot to do it. There is, however, a way you can look at the earth from above and see it as a snapshot! (Snapshots taken from satellites!)\n\nEarth.Google.com\n\nYou do have to download a free program and install it, but I spent about two weeks of my spare time looking at places I've never been, or haven't been in a long time. Places like the Eiffel Tower, Grand Canyon, Mt. Rushmore. I also went places I go all the time, like my house. I noticed the picture was taken years ago because it showed construction going on that has been completed a while.\n\nIt's fun, but sorry it's not streaming video. It's not even that up to date, but you can go see things that don't change much!
421754
We're located in a tiny remnant of a spiral arm called the 'Orion Arm', between two larger arms.  We're located in the main disk, about 25,000 light years out from the core.  This puts us about half way between the core and the edge of the galaxy.  I put an artist's conception below.
65484
To clarify more, cepheid stars are one the most common way to determine the distance to a distant galaxy. These stars are extremely uniform in their brightness, so by measuring their brightness as seen from the Earth, scientists can determing how far away that star would have to be to be that faint.
725849
Sure, it's possible. But you won't see any artifacts there. Even the largest telescope on earth does not have the resolution to see a 10 meter spacecraft from a distance of 350,000 km.\n\nAn object that size at that distance subtends an arc of .005 arcseconds. Both Hubble and Keck (the best telescopes on or near earth) have a resolution limit of about .05 arcseconds.
521248
The key is long exposure. Galaxies are very dim and you need to keep the shutter open on the camera for several minutes or even many hours. The camera is usually attached to a telescope, but not always. A regular telephoto lens is big enough for the larger nearby galaxies. To prevent blurring, the telescope or lens must track the galaxy exactly all the time the shutter is open, because the sky and everything in it appears to move as the Earth rotates. It may surprise you that many galaxies are actually quite large in our sky. The famous Andromeda galaxy, for example, appears several times larger than the Moon does, but it is so dim that you can only see the brightest part of the core without long exposure photography.
820102
Well, we know that the galaxy is rotating, if for no other reason than by analogy with other galaxies we see in the universe which we can see rotating.  Moreover, we more or less know the basic shape of the galaxy, which is a rotating disk of stars with a central ball shaped bulge of stars (which also rotates, but the important thing here is the disk).  Additionally we can infer from observations that whatever the center of the galaxy is, we're not it.  :)\n\nUsing the doppler shifts of light, we can tell how fast other stars or clouds of dust in the galaxy are moving with respect to us (but only in the sense that this would be the speed if the star/dust was moving directly towards or away from us).  So, you measure the speed of things around the disk of the galaxy, and there will be four directions in which the speed you measure will be zero.  The final thing we do is look to see which direction has more "stuff".  The direction with more stars and dust (and the central bulge too) is the one which is the center of the galaxy.\n\nNow, if you're wondering why you just wouldn't look for the central bulge or the direction with more stars and dust, well, this will give you the general direction of the galactic center, but it's not very precise.  It's the astronomical equivalent of saying, "It's over that-away".  To get something more precise and exact, you need to do something else, which could be what I was saying above.  Above you would get four pretty precise and exact directions separated by 90 degrees on the sky, and all that's left is to tell which one is towards the center of the galaxy, which is when you fall back on the obvious method as the way to pick between the four more precise answers.  Basically, if you had a big compass engraved on a stone on the ground without any directions marked, having someone tell you that "North is that-away" gesturing in some direction will tell you which of the directions on the compass is north.\n\nOne interesting thing to note is that today our telescopes have improved to the point where we can take pictures of the center of the galaxy and see stars moving around it very quickly.  If we didn't know where the center of the galaxy was and had those pictures we could make a pretty good guess and say that that's where the center of the galaxy is.
271735
They make those. Maybe try http://www.skyandtelescope.com \nOr you could take a regular globe mark some 300odd major stars in position with the aid of a star catalog (glowinthedarkpaint?) and then paint the rest black. Everything'd be backwards unless you could stick your head inside (?) Meow.
1185180
Images like that aren't available except to the NSA/CIA + the companies who run the commercial satelites who can sell you the images for a fee: http://www.spaceimaging.com/gallery/
713708
Maybe you could make use of a giant mirror orbiting directly above you geostationarily in space.\n\nSo you could see your house... from the sky. :)
990280
astronomer/photographer
618114
The nearest star in the night skyis 4.3 light years away from us. This means that the light you see started out over 4 years ago. So, in that sense, the image is 4 years old. Stars that are farther away have correspondingly older images. The farthest we can see without a telescope is the Andromeda Spiral galaxy which is 2 million light years away. The light from this galaxy started out 2 million years ago! So, we are lookingback in time 2 million years when we see it.\n\nThis isn't unusual, though. When you hear something, you are hearing it as it was rather than how it is. Just imagine an airplane in the sky. The place where the sound comes from won't be where you see the plane. Similarly, you don't hear thunder until the sound gets to you from the lightning strike. So you are hearing it as it was, not as it is. The only difference is that stars are far enough away that the light takes years rather than seconds to travel the distance.
552669
Some of the sattelites Google has been forced to use are quite old, but new imagery is being collected every day. Eventually there will be new high resolution pictures of the whole surface of the planet. I know a guy who is writing messages on his roof so he can see them in the sattelite pictures...he's kind of a nutjob.
91941
If you want to see your home from the sky try google earth.\nIt will show you any place from 100 meteres up to several miles up.
362021
We can only give a rough guess as to how many galaxies there are, and it's billions at least. All but the closest ones visible as galaxies to the naked eye have names. Our local galaxy is the Milky Way, which you can see in a dark place on a clear night as a streak of stars running across the sky. A cluster is a group of galaxies.\n\nSome galaxies we have discovered with Hubble and other new telescopes seem to crashing into each other, and the Milky Way may be on its way to having a galactic interloper in the far future.
815038
Ask mom or dad if you can borrow their camera for your project.  You need a camera that will let you set the shutter to open for say an hour.  ON a clear night go outside in a very dark place and place the camera on a table open the shutter to take the picture and wait.  The Picture you will see will be of the stars only they should show signs of having tails..  This will show the amount of distance the planet moved and rotated in relation to the fixed point ( the stars )  It will also give you a cool picture.  Good luck.