Just a side fact from reading this post, which I thought was pretty interesting:

Super novas are a phenaomena that occur very rarely. Basically, when a star implodes, as the Sun eventually will do, just not in our lifetimes, or in the next many many many generations, it lets off a large source of light, called a nova. Super novas are a little different. This is when a star implodes twice, and the second implosion lets off an extremely large amount of light from the ridiculous amount of energy released.

The last super nova seen lit up the night sky for many seconds, which is an amazing feat. It has been studied that when we usually see super nova light flashes, which only occur once in a lifetime if you are lucky, it is the product of star that imploded millions of years ago.

Basically saying, that stars are very far away, with retrospect to the 8 second factoid presented by Insanity above.