Have any of you space hounds ever read or heard of how the stars actually look like from space? I know Hubble works, and Apollo crew took sextant shots, but I'm talking about the esthetic experience of actually looking at the night sky without an atmosphere being in the way.

I imagine in vacuum all views of space are through thick plexiglass, probably smeared by fingerprints, electrostatically clinging microdebris and anti-glare coatings. But my personal fantasy about space has always been to stare with naked, dark-adapted eyes at the universe, through a millimeter of the finest, clearest, cleanest undistorted optical glass available.