system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it possible to get close enough to a galaxy so that it's bright for the human eye, yet far enough that you can see it's full shape?

Since telescopes compress the focal range astronomically, wouldn't it be impossible to see galaxies as they appear in images? I guess another way to put this is, I'm thinking that at any given planet in the universe, discounting any close objects, the night sky will always be dark with tiny twinkles. I can't imagine being close enough for it to be visible without being "in" the galaxy. Is this right?
gpt
Galaxies are actually pretty big in the sky - the reason they're difficult to see is mostly because of how dim they are. A telescope gets around this by being a larger light bucket than your eyeball, and by collecting light over a longer time.

There are three galaxies other than the Milky Way that are visible to the naked eye - Andromeda, and the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. They are dim cloudy patches that can only be seen under reasonably dark and clear conditions. But the Large Magellanic Cloud is several times bigger than a full Moon on the sky - so resolution is not at all the problem.

However, getting closer doesn't make galaxies brighter. For *resolved* objects, like a galaxy, or the wall of the room you're in, brightness does not depend on distance. You do get more *total* light from an object when it's closer, but the about of light *per square degree of your field of view* doesn't change. This is why, for instance, if you move your eye from 30 cm away from the wall to 1 cm away from the wall, it doesn't become 900 times brighter - it looks the same.

Galaxies get a little bit dimmer with distance because space is a bit dusty, but galaxies are just pretty dim to start with, just because the stars are really that spaced out.

That said, if we were in the middle of a dense galaxy cluster, you likely would see a *lot* more cloudy patches in the night sky. We live in a galaxy "group", which basically consists of two big galaxies (the Milky Way and Andromeda), one medium galaxy (Triangulum), and a bunch of little satellite galaxies. But in a galaxy *cluster*, there might be dozens (or even hundreds!) of galaxies the size of the Milky Way or bigger, and many would be visible in the night sky.