Basically, 2,000+ galaxies were revealed in a speck of sky which could be blocked out by a grain of sand held at arm's length!
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January 15, 1996
Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this deepest-ever view of the universe, called the Hubble Deep Field (HDF), made with NASAs Hubble Space Telescope.
Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.
Representing a narrow keyhole view all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown here).
This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. (The relatively bright object with diffraction spikes just left of center may be a 20th magnitude star.)
Though the field is a very small sample of sky area it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks the same in all directions.
The image was assembled from many separate exposures (342 frames total were taken, 276 have been fully processed to date and used for this picture) with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), for ten consecutive days between December 18 to 28, 1995. This picture is from one of three wide-field CCD (Charged Coupled Device) detectors on the WFPC2.
This true-color view was assembled from separate images were taken in blue, red, and infrared light. By combining these separate images into a single color picture, astronomers will be able to inferat least statisticallythe distance, age, and composition of galaxies in the field. Bluer objects contain young stars and/or are relatively close, while redder objects contain older stellar populations and/or farther away.
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA12110
You know NASA is editing out the Kaiju in those pics, right?
Cool.
5.56mm
The one that was on the site was too small, so I found what I thought was the same but larger and clearer. In any case, the image below is definitely the first HDP taken in 1995.
They’re going “They jig is up. We’ve been spotted!”
Quite a technological achievement for ts time.
Awe inspiring. God is great.
makes abstract expressionist art look like a kindergarten drawing