“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.” –Joseph Campbell
Imagine you just stared into darkness, collecting every photon of light that came by. What would you wind up seeing? The Hubble Space Telescope has done this many times, creating the Hubble Deep Field first and then the Hubble Ultra Deep Field with upgraded cameras and more time. But most recently, the eXtreme Deep Field has surpassed even that.
Image credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team (inset) / NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team (main).