Can the "Milky Way" galaxy be seen by the naked eye in a clear sky?

Not quite like in the photo above, which shows more than what the naked eye can see, but yes, absolutely! Our galaxy (well, the chunk of it visible from these parts) is a naked-eye object. The fact that your question even exists shows how much time is now spent by people under light-polluted skies.

It will not be visible from the city, however. You need to drive an hour (or two, if you live in a huge urban area) to the country side, far from city lights. Stay outside in full darkness for a few minutes, then look up. There will be a faint "river" of light crossing the sky. That's the Milky way. Full dark adaptation occurs after 30 minutes of not seeing any source of light, but this is not required for seeing our galaxy.

While you're in a dark sky area, also look up the Andromeda galaxy, a.k.a. M31.

http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~huffman/m31.html

I mean, if you can see M31 with the naked eye, at 2 mil light-years away, then of course you can see Milky Way, which is basically in our backyard.

Here's a light pollution map, not very recent, but still useful:

http://www.jshine.net/astronomy/dark_sky/


Can the "Milky Way" galaxy be seen by the naked eye in a clear sky?

Yes. I live in rural Ontario, Canada, and see the Milky Way naked eye every clear moonless night from my deck.

Is this photo "real"? Are the stars not super-imposed in the image?

Yes, the photo is real. This is a time exposure, fairly short, guided on the stars. If you look at it closely, you will see that the stars and the Milky Way are extremely sharp, but the observatory buildings are blurred, because the camera was guided on the stars, which were moving because of the Earth's rotation, so that the buildings "trailed." This is probably a single exposure, not any sort of combination of images or PhotoShop manipulation. My friend Terry Dickinson produces images like this all the time—this may in fact be one of his images. The diagonal line is a laser mounted on the telescope in the dome, used for image stabilization.