What does the view of the Milky Way on a dark night actually represent?

The combined, smeared-out light of countless distant, unresolved stars.

The iconic hazy, luminous band seen stretching across the night sky is not an accurate representation of the Milky Way’s true structure. Because we are inside the disk, our eyes cannot resolve the individual stars that make up the galaxy at great distances. Therefore, what we perceive is the accumulated, collective light from billions of stars that are too far away to be seen distinctly. This combined light smears together visually, creating the continuous luminous band that gave the galaxy its name, but it fundamentally obscures the underlying spiral arms and bar structure that astronomers must deduce through other means.