Cheers folks.
Regardless of whether we've got the color balance exactly right there's no getting away from the fact we all capture that dust in the Milky Way as brown.
I sat in on a CAS talk given by an ANU professor last year and he described how the brown dust consists mostly of superfine Carbon "soot" that was emitted in the past from older exploded stars. He said the color if you could see it would be like a very bad smog. He called it the exhaust from the great star factories.
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There is a gap in the dust. It's the M24 the Sagittarius star cloud. The Milky way is a spiral galaxy with arms and the dust is too thick in most places for us to see much toward the centre of the galaxy, however I'm told that M24 is actually a break in the cloud arm that is facing us. Through that gap (M24) we actually see into the next arm. Nice. But yeah, the dust and stuff in that next inner arm prevents us from seeing what's beyond. Infrared helps. It can penetrate the haze much better than visible light, and of course X-rays, etc..
