Called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, this photo above was assembled by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs taken of a patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. More than 2,000 images of the same field were taken with Hubble’s two premier cameras – the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3, which extends Hubble’s vision into near-infrared light – and combined to make the XDF. The new full-color XDF image reaches much fainter galaxies, and includes very deep exposures in red light, enabling new studies of the earliest galaxies in the universe. The faintest galaxies are one ten-billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see. Hubble pointed at a tiny patch of southern sky in repeat visits for a total of 50 days, with a total exposure time of 2 million seconds. Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth, D. Magee, and P. Oesch (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team
eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF
