Why Do They Call It the Milky Way?
The stars in the group are so numerous that they present to the naked eye a whiteness like a stream of milk. To produce this effect there are not hundreds of stars, nor thousands of them, but actually millions of them.
When you stop to think that each one of these stars in the Milky Way is a sun like our own—some of them smaller, of course, but many of them much larger—you begin to realize how impossible it is for man to form any real idea of the magnitude and wonders of the earth. Here in the Milky Way are so many suns like our own sun that they together as we look at them form the particles of a path which makes the circle of the heavens, and yet are so far away that to the naked eye each of them looks to us like only one of countless drops of milk in a very large stream of milk that goes around the whole sky.