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The plane of a disk-shaped galaxy contains most of its stellar disk. In ordinary sky-coordinate usage the galactic plane refers to the Milky Way's disk plane. A concentration of interstellar dust near that plane produces a prominent component of galactic foreground emission.

The Milky Way is the barred spiral galaxy containing the Solar system. Its galactic disk, central stellar bar and surrounding stellar halo are viewed from inside the disk, so distance and obscuration complicate attempts to reconstruct the whole system. Radio astronomy supplies a geometric route through the obscuring interstellar dust: masers near young massive stars act as compact markers whose parallaxes and proper motions can be measured by very-long-baseline interferometry. A 2019 analysis of about 200 such markers mapped spiral structure and constrained the rotation curve using their three-dimensional motions. These measurements connect the familiar bright band along the galactic plane with a spatial and dynamical model.^[ref]

Observer motion produces the cosmic microwave background dipole: to first order in $\beta =v/c$,The direction of motion is hotter and the opposite direction cooler. Its full-sky pattern has one broad positive hemisphere and one broad negative hemisphere; it is not concentrated in the galactic plane.