This is an image of the most distant galaxies ever seen by humans!
The faintest of these galaxies are several billion times fainter than you could see with 20/20 vision. Most of them contain billions of stars. They appear so faint because they are so far away.
When the light that we now receive from the faintest of these galaxies started its journey toward us, the universe was less than 1/10 its current age of roughly ten billion years. The sun and earth did not yet exist!
Some of the galaxies are spirals like our own Milky Way. Others have elliptical shapes. Still others seem to be painfully twisted and intertwined. They are probably colliding galaxies that tug on each other and may be merging.
The above image was taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in December of 1995 as part of the Hubble Deep Field project. The goal of the project is to study the most distant galaxies in the universe and discover how the structure we see all around us today -- planets, stars, galaxies -- came into being.
Check out other observations in the Observation of the Week Archive.