This is one of my favorite pictures from Astronomy Picture of the Day—and is apparently quite popular with the APOD folks as well, since they've run it several times before.
The foreground image and the accompanying text are beautiful and interesting. That's great.
(Be sure to click on the image, to get full-screen resolution.)
But:
Do you see the four stars with diffraction spikes? Three are near each other just to the upper left of the main galaxy, and one is in the bottom-left quadrant. Found them?
Aside from those four stars, which are in the Milky Way galaxy and which are therefore pretty close to us, every other point of light in this picture is from a galaxy. Many have visible shape. But every one of those tiny little dots is a galaxy some untold millions or possibly billions of light years away, and each one contains millions or billions of stars.
Good stuff.
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