You'd have no trouble understanding that andromeda is a large number of magnitudes bigger than the moon even if your entire astronomical education was from that

You'd have no trouble understanding that andromeda is a large number of magnitudes bigger than the moon even if your entire astronomical education was from that Star Wars intro scroller. It's a total non-issue. What I find surprising (really unexpected!) is how close this "appears bigger than the moon" observation makes our neighbor galaxy: considerably less than 100 "galaxy diameters"! My intuitive understanding of the vastness of space would have expected far more emptiness. (objectively, that's certainly more than made up by the insane amounts of emptiness we already have within each galaxy, but still, so close!)