"A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars." - Carl Sagan Perhaps the most striking feature of the night sky under truly dark conditions isn't the canopy of those thousands of points of light, but rather the expanse of the Milky Way, streaking across the entire night sky. Image credit: Richard Payne, retrieved from astro.wisc.edu. With an estimated 200-400 billion stars contained within our island Universe, the Milky Way is just a regular, run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy compared to the rest of what's out there. But it's our home. And, despite the tremendous difficulty associated with resolving the individual stars within it, we've been trying to do exactly that since the first modern astronomers took to the skies with their telescopes.