NASA Made an Ultimate Photo with 16 Years of Hubble Exposures

NASA astronomers have created an ultimate stitched panorama of galaxies in the night sky using 7,500 individual photos shot through 16 years’ worth of exposures using the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s called the Hubble Legacy Field.

The deep-sky mosaic is a single photo that contains roughly 265,000 galaxies that go back as far as 13.3 billion years — that’s just 500 million years after the big bang. And the faintest and farthest galaxies in the photo are 1/10,000,000,000th (that’s one ten-billionth) the brightness of what human eyes can see.

Here’s a image showing the relative size of the Hubble Legacy Field image in the night sky compared to the Moon — both are about half the width of your forefinger when extended to arm’s length:

To give you a better idea of just how much resolution and detail is in the Hubble Legacy Field photo, here’s a video that zooms out from the thousands of galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field photo to the 265,000 galaxies in the full Hubble Legacy Field photo:

“No image will surpass this one until future space telescopes are launched,” NASA says.