Are the "background noise" of the images also stars? It's the first time I realize the darker parts of the universe, while zoomed in, looks disturbingly noisy and bright.
I would even say that we are only seeing brightest stars and clusters of stars.
The best example of "dark" parts of the sky not being really dark is the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Ultra-Deep_Field It's pretty hard to find truly dark areas of the sky when you're looking far enough. The mind-blowing part is that almost all of those bright spots are galaxies, not stars.