The Universe's two o'clock feeding

Nearly every time the sun goes down on a cloudless sky, we enter a time machine. To look up into the night sky is not only to see stuff astonishly far away, but to look into the past. It takes years for light from distant stars to reach our retinas. You're looking at where they were, not where they are. You are looking into the past.
Well, it's been reported in the journal Nature, scientists have gotten a glimpse at the universe when it was nothing but a colicky infant, catching a view of something called a gamma-ray burst from 12 billion light-years away, meaning 12 billion years from the past. This is very early in the universe's life span when a star fell into black hole like a dish of strained peas being flung to the kitchen floor.
The idea of scientists peering to the edge and the beginning of the universe gives me the heebie-jeebies. In a good way.
I wonder if others feel the same way.