Hubble’s Spectacular Wide View of the Universe

Astronomers developed a mosaic of the distant Universe, called the Hubble Legacy Field, that documents 16 years of observations from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. The image contains 200,000 galaxies that stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the Big Bang.

The new set of Hubble images, created from nearly 7,500 individual exposures, is the first in a series of Hubble Legacy Field images. The image comprises the collective work of 31 Hubble programs by different teams of astronomers. Hubble has spent more time on this small area than on any other region of the sky, totaling more than 250 days, representing nearly three-quarters of a year. The team is working on a second set of images, totaling more than 5,200 Hubble exposures, in another area of the sky.