I believe this article was posted around the time that astronomers started using the term “galaxy” in the modern sense. (Though I couldn’t find any firm dates on when this occurred) Previously the prevailing term had been Spiral Nebulae or other assorted terms like “star cloud” used below. This makes sense as it was only in the 1920′s that Hubble showed galaxies existed outside of the Milky Way.

Incidentally, the current estimate for the number of stars in the Milky Way is 200-400 billion. And of course the Milky Way is only one of roughly 170 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Yeah, the universe is a really, really big(video).

How Many Stars in Sky? 40 Billion

NEW counts of the number of stars that could be seen with perfect telescopes of unlimited power were announced recently by astronomers of Mount Wilson Observatory. The number of stars visible to an unaided human eye probably is not over 6000. But large telescopes, like the great 100-inch one at Mount Wilson, which is the largest in the world, show millions of stars even in a small part of the sky.