One parsec is the distance from which observer would see the Earth's orbit under angle of one arcsec and is 3.16 ly.
So, how far away are the stars? The closest star is Proxima Centauri and it is 4.3 light years away from us. That means as we just learnt that light need to travel more than four years from Proxima Centauri to reach us. This star is very faint and is not visible by naked eye, but here are some stars you might recognize by their names and their distances: Sirius 11 light years, Vega 26 light years, Aldebaran ...
Those stars are relatively close to us and distances to the other, farther stars, galaxies and groups we measure in thousands of light years(parsecs) or milions or even bilions of light years.
I have already mentioned our own galaxy - Milky way and here is the picture - how our galaxy would look from far away. Actually this is the picture of M31 but our galaxy is very similar to it.
Our Sun is aproximately 15000 parsecs away from the Galaxy center. Our Galaxy consists of aproximately 10 bilion stars.
Our ancestors were lucky that there was very little light pollution so they had more often an oportunity to see and to be amuzed by the beauty of sky full of stars. They had much more time and they thought about it and they imagined many things. For a very long time they did not have a full knowledge about what stars really are - they had only feeling that they are far away and unreachable . As it usual for us (human race if we are still human) when something is out of reach, we are really tempted to reach it!! So first we have to know:
What are the stars or is the Sun a star?