Galileo Galilei used his first basic telescope and found the Milky Way in 1610. He also saw that the Milky Way was made up of countless stars. Immanuel Kant thought that the Milky Way was a large collection of stars held together to by mutual gravity like our solar system. The collection of stars had to be flat like a disk and the Solar system embedded within the disk. William Herschel tried to map out the shape of our galaxy in 1785. He never realized that the large portions of our galaxy were hidden by gas and dust which hid the true shape of our galaxy. In 1920, Edwin Hubble provided evidence that the spiral nebulae in the sky were other galaxies. This helped astronomers understand the actual shape of our galaxy and how big the universe actually was.