Deepest View Yet
Launched in 1989, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) continues to deliver our best views of the Universe yet.Click the buttons above, to browse through three small extracts from the Hubble Deep Field. This famous image was made in 1996. The astronomers who made it were attempting to see as far as possible. They chose a patch of sky with no nearby stars or galaxies blocking the view. The area actually appears dark in small telescopes. They made a 100 hour exposure to capture as much light as possible. The resulting image, of a speck of sky abut the size of a grain of sand on the tip of one's thumb at arm's length, became our deepest ever view of the Universe.
The complete image contains over two thousand galaxies. From it, we infer that there are at least 50 billion galaxies in the Universe. Open a high resolution version of the complete image [2 MB].
