Yes there’s the star cluster. Stars are born in gas clouds like this.
Once the stars are mature, the dust gradually blows away. The Orion Nebula is the nearest star forming region to us. You can see it even with binoculars as a slightly fuzzy “star” in Orion’s sword.
Viewed close up with Hubble it looks like this:
We can see a later stage in this process in the Pleiades star cluster, aka Seven Sisters which is a bit to the right of Orion when you see Orion in the upright position as in that photograph above.
The stars are hot blue young stars less than 100 million years old and there is still a lot of dust which you see the light reflected off. Pleiades Most people can see several stars in this cluster. Not necessarily seven. Some see fewer and some see a lot more, depending on how good their eyes are and on how clear the sky is.
Between the Pleiades and Orion, you can see the Hyades, as a V shaped pattern of stars. If you look at it with binoculars you see many stars here. It’s a little older than the Pleiades at 625 million years old. The red star Antares, is not part of the cluster but a foreground star.
This shows it at the top along with another cluster Praesepe to scale:
To find out more with some more photos: V-shaped Hyades star cluster easy to find Hyades
These are all open clusters. They are all inside our galaxy and indeed quite close to the sun compared to the vast size of the galaxy though they are many light years away. The Hyades are 153 light years away and it has several hundred stars.
Notice that as they get older the stars spread out. Eventually they merge with the rest of the galaxy.
There are many smaller clusters also orbiting our galaxy. Many are the rather spectacular “Globular cluster” arranged in a spherical pattern.
A Swarm of Ancient Stars - GPN-2000-000930
Then there are the dwarf galaxies, like a galaxy but much smaller and they tend to be irregular in shape. We have two of those orbiting our galaxy as well, only visible from the Southern hemisphere
Magellanic Clouds ― Irregular Dwarf Galaxies.
There are many other small dwarf galaxies orbiting our galaxy, some very faint.
The stars that make up our galaxy are a mix of many stars that formed here in open clusters, as well as stars that were in earlier dwarf galaxies that merged with our galaxy.
Our sun was born in a gas cloud and we might be able to recognize our siblings by the composition. This seems very likely to be one of our siblings: HD 162826 - if so it is surprisingly close, only 110 light years away. It’s not visible to naked eye but can be seen in binoculars.
Solar Sibling HD 162826, see also The Sun's Family Photos
The open clusters are a good way of classifying stars up to a point but when they age the stars get scattered throughout the galaxy and even if you could locate them all they are not connected in any way except for their origin and composition.
So for larger regions of the galaxy they use the spiral arms structure. Our sun is part of the Orion Arm - Wikipedia
File:OrionSpur.png - Wikimedia Commons
This is a small part of the spiral structure of our galaxy which is like this - you can see the Orion-Cygnus arm and in the middle of it the solar system just above the center of the spiral:
Of course it is impossible to take a photograph of the milky way from this angle. But we can look deep into the galaxy edge on using various wavelengths and so work out what shape it must be.
The spiral arms are continually changing and stars continually move in and out of them. So this way of marking out regions in our galaxy is a bit like marking out patterns on a pond with ripples moving back and forth across it. But on the timescales of our lifetimes and indeed for thousands of years the structure will remain unchanged.
100 million animated stars in motion form natural spiral patterns. The patterns in our galaxy are reinforced because gas piles up in the spiral arms leading to birth of new stars there so the brightest youngest stars are formed in the spiral arms and they have such short lifetimes they fade and reach old age before they have time to leave the arms..
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