Here is a smaller object that requires a lot of magnification, so it is shot from the rear, the Crab Nebula:
6523 light years from earth. Pretty close. The Milky Way is about 100K light years across, so it is probably inside. The closest galaxy, Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away. It is crazy to think that that the photons from that first photo are 2.5 million years old. Andromeda may not look anything like this today, 2.5 million years later.
Some of these Nebula look like smoke, although they are many light years across. Even if the dust and gasses are moving at thousands of miles per hour, we will not see much change in a thousand years.
Most people believe that with a powerful enough telescope in space, we could see every star and galaxy in the universe. We can't because the universe is expanding and accelerating so fast that the outer things are moving faster than the speed of light, so photons from those things will never reach us, ever. In fact some of the things that we can see today will not be there in a thousand years. This is why we have a night sky and all of the stars in the universe do not illuminate the earth all night long. As time goes on, our night will be a bit darker, with fewer stars. Most of them are in our own Milky Way galaxy though, so most will still be visible. The limited sphere of things we can see is called "the observable universe".
