The Hubble Space Telescope has made over 1.5 million observations since its launch in 1990, capturing stunning subjects such as the Eagle Nebula and producing data that has been featured in almost 18,000 scientific articles. But no image has revolutionized the way we understand the universe as much as the Hubble Deep Field.
Taken over the course of 10 days in 1995, the Hubble Deep Field captured roughly 3,000 distant galaxies varying in their stages of evolution, stunning the world. This video features some of the scientists and engineers that work on Hubble, and how the Hubble Deep Field changed everything.
This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009). The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.
