Sweet site! My only question is how do they take a picture of the Milky Way Galaxy edge on as if we're outside it? Or is it that just how the edge of the Milky Way galaxy looks from our position on one of the spiral arms?

Also, have you played around with 'Sky' feature in Google Sky? Its awesome, you can pan around space like you would with Google Earth, + you get to see how it looks in the infared or microwave spectrums.

http://www.google.com/sky/

That's much better...the Hubble panoramas are incredible.

There are some fucking crazy and amazing things about this 'verse. Still anything about astronomy excites me, especially after just watching the complete Cosmos series on hulu. Don't get how that milky way pic was taken though....

I'm pretty sure your guess was right, that's just how it looks from where we are. We're pretty far from the center, so if you look toward the center you can see the majority of the galaxy. On a clear night you can actually see it as a sort of big stripe of stars all the way across the sky.