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"We Asked NASA Scientists and Astronauts...
'What is your Favorite Hubble Image?'"

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Hi, my name is Paul Morris, and I'm a video 
producer for the Hubble Space Telescope.

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Over the years, I've had the amazing opportunity 
to interview some of the brightest minds in  

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astrophysics, and some of the coolest astronauts 
and people in the world. As a rule, I always ask  

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every single person this one question. Every. 
Single. Time.

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This is the cliche question,  

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but what's your favorite Hubble image? 
Oh, what is my favorite Hubble image? Ah.  

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Can you talk about your favorite Hubble image?

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What is your favorite Hubble image and why?

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What is your favorite Hubble image and why?

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I began to see a pattern in their answers.

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The Hubble Deep Field.

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The Ultra Deep Field.

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The Ultra Deep Field.

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One of the questions you were going to ask me was, 
what was my favorite image? My favorite image is  

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the Deep Field image because it's one that that 
tells an incredible story about our universe.

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Back In 1994, Robert Williams, then director 
of the Space Telescope Science Institute in  

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Baltimore, Maryland, came up with a plan. He 
wanted to point Hubble at a spot in the sky  

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where there was seemingly nothing there. A 
lot of scientists and astronomers at  

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the time thought this was a huge waste of 
valuable Hubble resources and pushed back.

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Williams, however, continued forward with his plan. He 
controlled 10 percent of Hubble’s observation  

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time, known as director’s discretionary 
time. He decided to use some of that to  

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take a long exposure that would be made 
immediately available to the public.

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Taken over the course of 10 days in 1995,  

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the Hubble Deep Field captured roughly 
3.000 distant galaxies in various stages  

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of evolution. 3,000 galaxies where it seemed 
like there was nothing. The world was stunned.

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When we finally looked at what 
came back it was one of the most  

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mind-boggling images of the whole Hubble 
collection. Galaxies with billions of stars and  

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billions of planets we know nowadays, 
and guess what? One of those planets  

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in this image may have somebody like you 
or me, or some other intelligent life form  

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that we don't even know about yet, so we got to 
keep searching. We gotta tell that story, you know?

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The “deep” in Hubble Deep Field refers to the 
telescope’s ability to look at some of these far,  

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faint objects. Looking at far-away objects in 
space is like seeing back in time. Light moves  

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at tremendous speeds, but it still takes time 
to travel across the vastness of space. Even  

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the light from our own Sun needs eight minutes and 
20 seconds to reach Earth. so when we look at the  

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Sun, we see it as it was a little more than eight 
minutes earlier. The farther away the object,  

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the younger it appears in Hubble’s eyes. The Deep 
Field was like a core sample of space, showing  

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galaxies at different and earlier stages of 
development the deeper they appeared in the image.

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Science and astronomy is all about 
honing and improving our senses.  

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No one expected the Hubble deep field to have 
thousands of galaxies in that single image…

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We thought X, and we were so wrong. And that 
experiment, it took great engineering to do,  

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with a great system, Hubble, allowed the 
astrophysics to say, "hold it!" You know, "it's  

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different." It helped connect the dark energy, dark 
matter theories, to what the light we can see is,  

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and for me, it's beautiful because it's 
like looking into a pond and seeing the water  

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molecules, and the living cells that are micron 
around, of the microbes, it's like that kind of  

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moment. It must have been like the early 
microscopists who first looked at pond scum  

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and said, "geez there's stuff going on!" Or Galileo 
when he first sensed the satellites of Jupiter.

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Since the original Hubble Deep Field,
Hubble has gone on to collect over 20 deep  

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fields of various parts of the sky in multiple 
wavelengths of light. To create each image,  

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it has gazed at the same point in space for 
many orbits, gathering as much light as it can.

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Every single one of these increased our 
knowledge of the universe and our place in it.

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The Hubble Ultra Deep Field, 
for instance, released in 2004,  

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had a longer exposure time 
than the previous deep field.  

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This new snapshot contained even more galaxies 
of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colors.

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The smallest, reddest galaxies may 
be among the most distant known,  

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existing when the universe was 
just 800 million years old.

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When I stare at that image, my imagination 
goes wild. I wonder what it would be like to  

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visit any one of those little smudges of light, 
which would be, presumably, possibly similar to our  

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own Milky Way Galaxy, and also realizing that if 
we extrapolate that image to the whole sky, that's  

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what our universe looks like. In any direction, 
we see a collection of galaxies like that.

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The width of the Hubble Ultra Deep 
Field is less than 1/10 the diameter  

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of the full moon. That’s like looking through the eye 
of a needle held at arm's length.

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And in that tiny 
space we found 10,000 galaxies.

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10.000 galaxies in that single space. 10.000 
galaxies in that one too,

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10.000 galaxies there.  and 10.000 galaxies there.

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10.000 galaxies there.  and 10.000 galaxies there too.

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If you add them all up, that means 
the entire observable universe  

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is estimated to contain at 
least 200 billion galaxies.

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200 billion galaxies. If each galaxy has 
an average of 100 million stars in it,  

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then that means there are at least 20 
quintillion stars in the observable universe.  

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That’s a 2 with 19 zeros after it!
 

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It makes me, of course just overwhelmed, 
but also, just very curious about,  

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wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just beam 
myself over to one of those galaxies and explore  

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around and see if they have stars and planets 
like we have in our own Milky Way? And just to  

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be amazed, not only at the magnitude of 
the universe but to be grateful that I can be  

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a part of the universe and have the ability to 
look out and see this grandeur. That's what I  

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love about the Ultra Deep Field, and that's 
what I love about astronomy images in general.

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Inspired by Hubble’s Deep Field,  

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other NASA Great Observatories would go on to 
take deep field images in their own wavelengths  

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of light. These observations continue to 
make NASA science even richer than before.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has 
helped us take a step forward  

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in understanding our place in the universe.

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With Hubble’s mirror acting as our eyes, we are 
just starting to perceive the real universe.  

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And the deep field images are yet another 
step forward to a brighter tomorrow.

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The image itself might not look as beautiful as a 
single spiral galaxy where you see all the stars.  

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But what you're looking at is a tiny little 
part of the sky, and they found thousands of  

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galaxies in that tiny little spot. And so you 
see this image, and the ones that are a little  

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closer to us, you can see some detail on. You 
can actually see that they're spiral galaxies,  

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or kind of blobby elliptical galaxies. 
They're actually beautiful little galaxies  

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in and of themselves. Of course they're 
not little, they're just very far away.  

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But then you see this background, which really just 
becomes dots. And each one of those dots is not  

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a star, but a collection of hundreds of billions 
of stars, just so far away that it appears as a dot.  

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And some of the smaller dots in that 
image, you're looking at galaxies as they were,  

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you know, more than 10, 11 billion years ago. In 
this tiny little dot in the sky, you can look  

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through it, and you can see the history of the 
whole universe. And so when you see the Hubble  

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Deep Field, you know I can feel, you know, 
the hair rising on the back of my neck, and  

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I'm getting goosebumps even just thinking about 
it, you know, through a tiny little pinhole you  

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can see the whole history of the universe, 
right there. That's the Hubble Deep Field.

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Wow.

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[ MUSIC ]