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Cool 3D rendering of the Milky Way galaxy by @StefanPWinc showing the curve of the galactic plane and dust using data from GAIA (ht @runnymonkey)
The galaxy our Sun and solar system resides within is a barred spiral galaxy about 105,700 light-years across. Its plane is not a perfectly flat disk though; astronomers have found that it has a warped shape. earthsky.org/space/milky-wa…
From Earth the Milky Way is a hazy band of stars with dark clouds of dust stretching across the sky, best visible from dark locations. We can't see the spiral shape because we're inside one of the arms, looking into the plane of it.
If somehow we could be positioned high above or below it, it'd look something like this (NGC 6744, a larger but similar barred spiral galaxy located 31 million light-years away and imaged by Hubble in 2013-2014.) 
Based on its brightness and mass, it's been estimated the Milky Way contains about 100 to 150 billion stars, although numbers vary greatly because we can't literally count them all. universetoday.com/123225/how-man…
