The Hubble Ultra Deep Field

From time to time I like to share some cool astronomy pictures from my favorite website (Astronomy Picture Of The Day). This is a site that NASA places old/new photos from space. They can be moon shots from the 60's & 70's to flybys of the planet Mercury that happened only a month ago. Either way, it's an AWESOME site to visit on a daily basis, and they have archives of all of their past photos since June of 1995, so there are plenty to keep you busy! One of the best features of the site is their layman's term explanation of the photo, and plenty of links to look up different topics in the article.
This is by far my favorite photo. I originally saw this in a physics course where a guest lecturer was explaining how different colors of light flow through space and why objects that are further away (and older) appear red (called RedShift). If you open the photo to it's full size I drew a green box around a galaxy (a tiny red dot just right of center about 1/4 of the way down from the top) that is calculated to be almost 13 billion light years away (822,990,000,000 miles!). That means it's ≈13 billion years old, and probably one of the first galaxies EVER! How cool is that!?!?



To give you an idea of how small of a patch of the sky this is:

• The portion of the sky in this photo covers only 10% of the area of a full moon. The area is just below Orion & Venus in the late fall sky (PHOTO)
• It took the Hubble Space Telescope around 1 million seconds to take this photo; 11.5 Days over the course of 3 months!
• To image the entire sky, it would take over a million years!

Just something fun to ponder on a cold Tuesday morning...:)