The Milky Way and its core..

[JR1987]

I was pondering this the other day... 

for instance.. take andromeda, even under heavy light pollution, using a telescope you can still make out a faint fuzzy ball, being the core.

So if thats 20 million light years away.. why is the milky ways core not blindingly obvious to all stargazers? 

[Dave Lloyd]

Isn't the core hidden by all the gas clouds out Sagittarius way. It's a great big black hole anyway isn't it?

[DaveS]

Because, looking at Andromeda 2.2 million LY away, we're looking right at the core with no intervening dust, whereas looking at the core of our own galaxy there are multiple thick dust clouds in the way. some would say and a good thing too, else we would have been fried several times in our history.

[Kropster]

Isn't the blob you see in Andromeda the central 'hub'....not just the very core?

As we are much closer to the Milky Way central blob, it would appear to us to be more spread out (perhaps?).