Thank you Captain Obvious. I never said i directly observed that there were individual stars in the Milky way. I said I could directly observe a transition from individually differentiable stars to the white haze. I could then reason that perhaps, in that haze, there are simply more stars than I could distinguish.
Your "observation" is severely clouded by prior knowledge, may I humbly point out.
If I show you a pattern of dots that gradually grow larger, and closer together, until finally it is solid black, could you not then reason that the solid black area is made up of dots so large and close that they touch or overlap?
Sure, I, can reason it. Ptolemy and Hipparchus could not. If they had, they could certainly never prove it. That's the point. They publicly stated their opinions for you and I to laugh at today. So there is no mistaking what their reasoning was.