> look behind it, and there are whole edge-on spiral galaxies in the distance. Not stars. Galaxies.

just to add to the awe of that, pretty much every "dot" in one of these images is going to be another galaxy. individual stars from within the Milky Way will have diffraction spikes and very obvious as a single item.

It's dizzying even on the galactic scale to internalize that discrete, visible stars are "right there" compared to the general murkiness of the Milky Way. A sphere of very near stars right next to us relatively speaking

There really is a lot of stuff left to see for the first time

"A lot" is the number of fish in a swarm maybe.

This is so far away from our concept of counting things that the mind just gives up. There's no comparison, no dumbing down to X amount of football fields, just nothing.

I find it depressing, confusing but also inspiring and fascinating at the same time.

Yes, there is so much we can’t possibly know or experience in our lifetimes, perhaps in the span of time our species will exist, to the extent that it becomes easy to imagine ourselves more like bacteria on a speck of dust floating in the air rather than on any scale towards the inverse. We’re incredibly small in size and mental capacity.

In ways the bacteria on the dust are oblivious to the scale and nature of the world around them, we seem similarly lost and hopeless in the pursuit of comprehending the universe. We just weren’t built to grasp this kind of scale. We can enjoy images of the tiniest little slices of it, though. I’m actually very grateful for that. I think it’ll be a source of endless wonder for my entire life.

I heard comparisons of the number of stars in the observable universe to the number of all grains of sand on Earth's beaches, or the number of molecules in a bottle of air. Not sure if that helps anyone, though.

The radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years. The Horsehead Nebula that they zoom into in the video is 0.000001375 billion light-years from Earth. I'm doing mind acrobatics to try to understand the scale but... nope! :)

That feeling of awe, if that could be shared with most people on earth - perhaps they wouldn't waste their pity lives fighting each other.

Wasn’t their recently an article on how witnessing a solar eclipse has a measurable effect on people’s view of the world? It certainly affected me.

I have never seen a solar eclipse in person, but I wonder whether this type of feeling has similarities with the overview effect [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect

Some substances can get you there.

I found this mesmerizing. Particularly fun is to scrub forward and backward through the video to clarify where exactly you're looking. (I found it worked better on the embedded video in the article than the yt one, not sure why)

There's also a zoom on the image on ESA - https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/

The zoomable version: https://esawebb.org/images/weic2411a/zoomable/

Do you (or does anyone) know about how zoomed in the video is at the start? Like is that the milky way and are there some things in that starting frame that I could identify with the naked eye?

It seems like it is already quite zoomed in to start with, but I can't tell how much.

At the start of the video you are looking at a good potion of the whole visible sky. If you look at the very center of the frame, there is Orion, and you can see the three close bright stars together that we zoom in towards are Orion's belt.

Oh my goodness... Yes, there's Orion and the belt. This gives me way better idea of what I'm seeing. Thank you so much.