But come on, the milky way doesnt look like this to the naked eye. You can only see a fraction of what is there. Everything else is to faint for a human eye to detect.
Exactly. The eye isn’t designed for “long exposures.” Some of the nebula visible from Earth have huge angular diameters. Bigger than the Moon, even. It’s just that they’re so dim–even on moonless, cloudless nights–that the eye can’t “properly” see them in the way a lens set to collect light over time can.
For a while, yeah.
And they did.
Exactly. The eye isn’t designed for “long exposures.” Some of the nebula visible from Earth have huge angular diameters. Bigger than the Moon, even. It’s just that they’re so dim–even on moonless, cloudless nights–that the eye can’t “properly” see them in the way a lens set to collect light over time can.