Earliest possible direct view of stars would be in late 1783, when the Montgolfier brothers flew their balloon. Actually, high mountains above the cloud level might allow some climbers to see them, so someone living in the Himalayas or the Andes would be the first.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort