Me and the Stars...

Living in the Southern hemisphere is really cool, at night I look up to the right of the sky and see the "Southern Cross" a collection of 4 stars; (that to me looks like a rectangle rather than a cross).  Next to it, is the "Milky Way".  Mind blowing stuff to witness with my own eyes each night.

Info I found on the net talking about the Milky Way:

 The Milky Way system is a spiral galaxy consisting of over
400 billion stars , plus gas and dust arranged into three general components:

• The halo - a roughly spherical distribution which contains the oldest stars in the Galaxy,
• The nuclear bulge and Galactic Center.
• The disk, which contains the majority of the stars, including the sun, and virtually all of the gas and dust

AND

The Milky Way is a barred spiral galaxy 100,000–120,000 light-years in diameter containing 200–400 billion stars. The galaxy is estimated to contain at least as many planets, 10 billion of which could be located in the habitable zone of their parent star.^[14] Depending on its structure the entire galaxy has a rotational rate of once every 15 to 50 million years. The galaxy is also moving at a velocity of 552 to 630 km per second, depending on the relative frame of reference. It is estimated to be about 13.2 billion years old, nearly as old as the Universe. The Milky Way is part of the Local Group of galaxies.