The deepest visible/ultraviolet light image of the universe ever taken, revealing galaxies down to 30th magnitude. Glaring fiercely across 12 billion light-years of space is the brilliant beacon of a distant quasar (z=2.2). Most of the galaxies in this view lie between us and the quasar. The image was taken with the camera on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS). The STIS recorded how numerous invisible intervening clouds of hydrogen gas affected the quasar's light. Some of the galaxies in the image may be linked to these clouds.

Credit: R. Williams (STScI), the HDF-S Team, and NASA/ESA