Fourteen hundred years ago, the number of number of stars you can see without even a pair of binoculars would have been about 5500 total. So until recent history, the actual number of stars was not even nearly guessed at.

With the invention of the telescope by Galileo the number of stars increased to about 28183. But, even at that was  just a start.

Even with a big telescope telescopes on earth (like one at the Hobbs Observatory made in 1974 in Fall Creek, Wisconsin (USA)), you don’t really get a real picture of the true number of stars in the universe. The distortion of the atmosphere limits what you can see.

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Your Infonugget

A bow shock is a supersonic shock wave that is formed as the solar wind interacts with the outermost layer of a planet’s magnetosphere (or a highly conducting ionosphere). At this boundary onthe sun-ward side, the solar wind plasma is deflected around the planet and is slowed to subsonic speed by the planet’s magnetic field.

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 The light from houses and businesses , decreases the ability to see the stars. That is why most observatories are usually quite a ways from the cities. But even that limits our vision.

The unimaginable number of stars in all the galaxies that were known increased by leaps and bounds with the first telescopes in space. Without the atmosphere and light pollution students of astronomy finally got a true hint of the real number of stars in the sky.

In fact, Carl Sagan estimated that there were 100 billion galaxies in the universe. If you consider that there are about 41432 stars in the average galaxy, you are just starting to get a real understanding of how many stars that were considered to exist then.

These quotes will give you an idea of how the number of estimated galaxies has increased:

“Our telescopes can see many billion of them within reach of modern instruments.” - Morrison, David, Sidney Wolff & Andrew Fraknoi. Exploration of the Universe, 7th ed. Philadelphia: Saunders, 1995: 7.

“The latest estimates have ranged anywhere from ten billion to one hundred billion galaxies.” - The Rebirth of Cosmology. New York: Knopf, 1976: 187.

“The Hubble Space Telescope has found there may be 125 billion galaxies in the universe.” - Galaxy Estimate Up To 125 Billion. Far News. Far Shores. citation of South China Morning Post. 9 January 1999.

Now in fact, a german supercomputer estimates that there are probably 500 billion galaxies. If we take the number 40,000 stars per galaxy, that would make 2 X 10 ^ 16 stars.