Stunning NASA image captures 10,000 galaxies

NASA’s image of 10,000 galaxies was a decade in the making.

The composite image is the result of 3,185 images taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope with a total exposure of 592 hours, said Rogier Windhorst, an astronomy professor at Arizona State University who helped create the composite image.

It took the telescope 841 orbits, and the result shows how galaxies are formed.

Before 2009, Hubble captured images of visible and near infrared light that showed both nearby galaxies and very distant galaxies going back to within a few hundred million years of the big bang, according to a NASA.

more…

slightly larger image here

Beautiful images Crazey

Makes an appearance on yesterday’s APOD

The first thing I find amazing about this is how many (15 or more) of the larger and therefore nearer galaxies are showing crossed lines indicative of starlike cores. These couldn’t all be Seifert’s could they?

You can usually tell how “deep” an image is by the spacings between observed galaxies. The galaxies here are very close together, therefore very deep.

Unfortunately, the field of view is small.

Let’s see, what’s the history?
Name – Year – duration of observation – field of view
Hubble Deep Field – 1995 – ten days, 2.5 arcminutes,
Hubble Deep Field South – 1998 – ten days, 2.3 arcminutes,
Hubble Ultra Deep Field – 2004 – eleven days, 2.4 arcminutes,
Hubble Extreme Deep Field – 2012 – twenty-three days, 2.15 arcminutes,
This one – 2014, no details given of equivalent duration of observation or field of view.

Hold on, this is the same image as the Hubble Extreme Deep Field, but shows more depth. Compare with the earlier image below.