How do we take pictures of the Milky way Galaxy if we are in the Milky way

First - sorry if you think that is a dumb question , but I'm just really .... not that old.

so , how do they take images of the milky way galaxy? It's like taking a picture of your entire house while you're inside it.

We don't. We happen to be on the edge so we can get some panoramic images of other parts inside of it, but anything depicting it from outside the galaxy is either a different galaxy that's assumed to look similar or an illustration.

It's like you went through your entire house and took pictures of each room in your house with color infrared film (infrared can see through dust and gas) and then stitched together the photographs taken in each room together to create a photo-mosaic digital image of each room, and you keep stitching together the photographs from inside each room of the house until you have the whole house stitched together into one digital image.

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/questio…

They don't. They take pictures of what they can see from here.

They can take what they've figured out about the distances to all these objects, and use that to create an image of what the milky way looks like (from some outside point of view), but this is at best a computer generated image.

They can take pictures of other galaxies as much as they want of course, and a lot of these no doubt look kind of similar to ours.

Artist rendition.

From the inside.