The Hubble Legacy Field is an image of a small region of space in the constellation Fornax, containing an estimated 265,000 galaxies. The original release was composed of Hubble Space Telescope data accumulated over a 16-year period. Looking back approximately 13 billion years (between 400 and 800 million years after the Big Bang) it has been used to search for galaxies that existed at that time. The image was taken in a section of the sky with a low density of bright stars in the near-field, allowing much better viewing of dimmer, more distant objects. It builds on the data collected for the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey.[1][2]
Located southwest of Orion in the southern-hemisphere constellation Fornax, the approximately rectangular image is about 25 arcminutes to an edge.[3] This is almost the angular diameter of a full moon viewed from Earth (which is about 31 arcminutes, or a half a degree).[4]
The images and data release were announced on May 2, 2019, by NASA.
- ^ "HubbleSite: News - Hubble Astronomers Assemble Wide View of the Evolving Universe". hubblesite.org.
- ^ Ashley Strickland. "This image is a 'history book' of the universe". CNN.
- ^ "HubbleSite: Categories - news". hubblesite.org.
- ^ "Moon Illusion". homepages.wmich.edu. Archived from the original on 2017-05-09. Retrieved 2019-05-05.