Thread: Viewing our own galaxy

Our galaxy has never been photographed on the whole has it. If it has then stop me from ridiculing myself further. Anyway, I was thinking of ways in which we can view our galaxy from outside and have come up with a rather rather idea. Why not take a planet with no atmosphere and has water, then the water will reflect light right into space. So if we can look into the correct planet in the right angle, we can see ourselves, i.e our galaxy as viewed from that point and can easily take a picture of our own galaxy. You are more than welcome to give in your ideas(so, I can use them for my own greater good), and might as well criticize my own idea. Yeah, why not,, unless you're a nihilist.

If there's no atmosphere then there can be no water.
That planet would have to be outside the galaxy ¹, we have enough trouble even detecting planets (usually by means other than visually) let alone getting a proper look at them.
Whatever image we get at such distances will be well outside of any resolution capabilities we have to see anything other just "reflected light" i.e. no actual image at all.
Think of it as someone holding up a small mirror, half a mile away. You can see the reflected light of the Sun (if it's at the right angle) but you can't see with sufficient resolution to determine that the Sun is spherical.

1 Yes we may have found one in the Andromeda galaxy but it's only a possible, not a definite (and, as hinted at later, it was detected by microlensing, not visually).

There was an old movie where the mad scientist used a telescope to see the reflection of light from Earth's past.
Had a close up birds-eye view of the K-T bolide killing dinosaurs.
Can't remember the name of the movie.

Seriously, you cannot collect coherent light at that distance.