The OP is on to something...a painting has a lot in common with a photograph, and I often say that space is a just a photograph of the distant past.
When you look into the nights sky, every star that you see is some other solar-systems sun...the stars are just so far away from our solar-system that they appear to be nothing more than bright, white, dots in our sky. If you could travel to one, you'd find that it was another big, hot, sun.
A solar-system is a star with planets/comets/moons/asteroids bound to its gravitational-pull; here's ours:
The reason I like to call space a 'photograph of the past' is because it's possible that none of the stars we see in sky exist anymore.
Here's what I mean: those stars are so far away, it takes the light they produce hundreds (sometimes thousands) of years to reach Earth. In the centuries that it took for that starlight to travel across space, the star that it originated from could have collapsed or exploded by the time that starlight is visible to us here on Earth.
My favorite astrophysicist (Neil deGrasse Tyson) likes to call space, "a sky full of ghosts" because all of those stars we see every night could already be dead; so when I look up at the sky every night, I just assume I'm looking at a 'photograph' that was 'taken' a thousand years ago.
