I don’t cover space nearly enough here on my blog. I miss the days of writing Space Bits with my friend Yaron Schoen.
Sometimes announcements of new images of our vast Universe just seem to float by with the deluge of information we’re bombarded with every single day. However, I figured this new image from Hubble worthy of taking the time to note.
The Hubble Legacy Field is yet another unfathomable achievement from that team. In the 90s the Hubble Deep Field showed us thousands of galaxies. It was mind blowing to see so much in one image. In the early 2000s came the Ultra Deep Field images which showed 10,000 galaxies! Then came the eXtreme Deep Field which was a collection of exposures over a 10 year period resulting in a look deep into the Universe’s past by focusing on just a tiny area of the original Deep Field viewport.
Now comes Legacy Field, a 16-year set of 7,500 individual exposures, to show us a wide view of 265,000 galaxies. 265,000 galaxies. Each likely hold billions, perhaps trillions of stars – each likely as big or bigger than our own home star – with countless planets orbiting each.
Only Hubble could accomplish this image. Fascinating stuff. An incredible achievement that took a lot of patience and endurance to pull off.
I wish space research, observation, and exploration had 100-times the funding it does currently.