Hubble Deep Field: How a Photo Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe

Hubble Deep Field: How a Photo Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe — page 1
Apollo 17 astronauts snapped a photo of Earth in 1972 that became known as the Blue Marble Williams wanted to capture a very different sort of image one of an area of space extremely far away from our planet Two years before he had become director of the Space Telescope Science Institute STScI which ran the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Hubble Space Telescope Launched into space in 1990 NASA’s Hubble held out the promise of clearly seeing cosmic objects so distant that they appeared dim and blurry from ground-based telescopes Williams wanted to point Hubble at a tiny patch of sky near the handle of the Big Dipper in the constellation Ursa Major the Great Bear The patch covers an area as big as a grain of sand held at arm’s length The plan was to take hundreds of pictures of the target area during 10 days Sophisticated computer software would combine them into a single image The goal was almost too ambitious to imagine Williams and his team wanted to test