Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields and Parallels

This is a gallery of the Hubble Space Telescope Frontier Fields. The top six panels are massive galaxy clusters that act as huge lenses in space, magnifying and stretching images of remote galaxies behind each cluster that are too faint for Hubble to see directly. While one of the telescope’s cameras looked at each cluster of galaxies, another camera simultaneously viewed an adjacent patch of sky. This second region is called a "parallel field" — a seemingly sparse portion of sky that provides a deep look into the early universe. Astronomers observed each of the six clusters and six parallel fields in both near-infrared and visible light. This allowed scientists to create more detailed, overlapping, and complete images.