There is a picture of the Galaxy Andromeda which I assume is relatively famous.
It occured to me last night that what we see when we look at the picture is the stars from our own galaxy alone. and andromeda in the distance. If we were able to travel to the ‘outskirts’ of our galaxy we would get an image of andromeda surrounded by blackness, or maybe other galaxies scattered about.
I guess what I am asking is, if it were possible to travel outside the galaxy, would space look very different?
It might look like this:
Actually, it would depend on what you were looking with. I would think that with the naked eye it would not look too different. The myriad galaxies would not be resolvable as such and would look like (very dim) stars. Any close galaxies should look pretty cool, though you may have a problem seeing them due to light levels. They may just look like a slightly luminescent blob in the darkness. Now if you had a camera, or some other way of integrating the light over a long period of time, it should look something like the picture above…
Hope this helps.
You mean out near Star’s End? 
Yeah, the night sky would get dark and lonesome in a hurry. Eyer8 has it right. Since the 40K light years you traveled to get outside of the galaxy’s disc would not have appreciably closed the one million, or so, light years to Andromeda it would still appear as a fuzzy third magnitude blob. Kind of disappointing in a way.
A fun fact to remember when you look at a picture of Andromeda: In angular size the Andromeda galaxy is five to six times the diameter of a full moon. Yep, it’s that damn big in the sky. What you’re seeing, if you can resolve it with the naked eye on a dark night and know where to look, is just the bright nucleus. Any wonder, then, that astronomers can get a little obsessive with regard to the diameter of their light buckets, er, telescopes.
