From Here To Infinity

Looking up into the night sky, it seems like you can see forever. If you use binoculars or a telescope that feeling is, literally, magnified - you can see thousands, millions of stars. But what you're seeing is barely scratching the depths of the Universe. You're looking out a few thousand light years into a galaxy a hundred thousand light years across, in a Universe where we can see distant galaxies over 10 billion light years away. We build bigger telescopes so we can see those far-flung objects, and we even put them in space so our bothersome atmosphere doesn't interfere with the view. The most famous is of course the Hubble Space Telescope. It's hard to describe just how much of an impact this Grande Dame of astronomy has had on our perception of the Universe... though looking into the Hubble Deep Fields, you get a glimmer of it. In 1995, Hubble stared at one spot in space for over 140 hours, creating the first Deep Field. It revealed thousands of galaxies at tremendous distance, showing us that the sky is filled with galaxies. The region of the sky for the first Deep Field was chosen because it was nearly devoid of stars and known galaxies, objects that would interfere with their more distant brethren. But what does that field look like from the ground? Astronomer Detlef Hartmann decided to tackle this question, and has done us all a favor by showing us. Using a 44 cm (17") telescope he built himself, he took an incredible 247 five-minute images to create this extraordinary picture with a total of 20 hours of exposure... and then lets it morph into the actual Hubble Deep Field to compare them: