The pictures we have of the milky way are any of them real or all concept arts?

Pictures from apparently outside the milky way galaxy are of course all artists conceptions.

Most every picture I have seen of the band of light seen in the sky called the "milky way", have been "enhanced" in some way, most often by exposing the frame for for far longer than the customary exposure time.

Nevertheless, from a dark site, the milky way is unexpectedly bright and spectacular to a city slicker who has rarely if ever been let outside at night and looked up at the sky.

Actually I am inspired to take a wide angle shot of the milky way next time i'm at my dark site. For the other photo-nerds out there, I'll be using a Canon F1 with a 17mm L series lens and 400asa film.

Cheers!

Pictures of PART of the Milku way galaxy are real. Pictures of the whole milky way galaxy may of images that have been stiticed together or are artists concepts. Most of the photographs you see are of the what I call the the Summir Milky Way, the Sagittirius Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. you need to look at the image credits, and sometimes those are not so easy to find.

Pictures of Milky Way seen like a spiral are all concept arts.

The Milky Way as seen at night do actually look likes a "milky way"

Artist conception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Artist%27s_impr...

Real (panorama): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ESO_-_The_Milky...

The ones from outside are concept arts - the ones from across the inside are real - you could take one.

Concept arts?

nasa.gov ... real photos from the Hubble space telescope, among others.

yes, there is concept art of our galaxy out there ... anything with an 'overhead' perspective is concept art because Earth is located in one of the spiral arms and we can't actually 'see' from that location

all of them are distorted by time , the milky way is 100 light years across that means the light from the nearest part is reaching us 100 years earlier than light that leaves at exactly the same time from the furthest part this applies incrementally to all light in between so in fact we have NO IDEA what the milky way actually looks like or in fact any other galaxy or astronomical body , the larger it is the more distorted the image will become

We have actual pictures of the milky way.