Hubble Legacy Field Crop

Hubble's Spectacular Wide View of the Universe

This Hubble Space Telescope image represents a portion of the Hubble Legacy Field, one of the widest views of the universe ever made.

The image, a combination of thousands of snapshots, represents 16 years' worth of observations.

The Hubble Legacy Field includes observations taken by several Hubble deep-field surveys, including the eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), the deepest view of the universe. The wavelength range stretches from ultraviolet to near-infrared light, capturing all the features of galaxy assembly over time. This cropped image mosaic presents a wide portrait of the distant universe and contains roughly 200,000 galaxies. They stretch back through 13.3 billion years of time to just 500 million years after the universe's birth in the big bang.

About the colours

These images are composites of separate exposures acquired by the ACS and WFC3 instruments on the Hubble Space Telescope. Several filters were used to sample broad and narrow wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic (grayscale) image associated with an individual filter. In this case, the assigned colors are: Blue: F606W (Wide V) Green: F606W (Wide V) and F850LP (SDSS z') Red: F850LP (SDSS z') The Hubble Legacy Field dataset has images from all three of Hubble's cameras — the WFC3/IR and WFC3/UVIS cameras as well as the ACS. More details about the HLF can be found at https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/hlf/.

About the data

The image was created from public archive Hubble data from the following proposals: 9352 , 10189 , 10340 , 12099 , and 12461 : A. Riess (STScI/JHU); 9425 : M. Giavalsco (University of Massachusetts); 9480 , and 9984 : J. Rhodes (JPL); 9488 : K. Ratnatunga (Carnegie Mellon University); 9500 : H. Rix (MPE) 9575 : W. Sparks (STScI); 9793 , 10530 , and 13779 : S. Malhotra (Arizona State University); 9803 : R. Thompson (University of Arizona) 9978 and 10086 : S. Beckwith (STScI); 10258 : C. Kretchmer (JHU); 10632 : M. Stiavelli (STScI); 11144 R. Bouwens (Universiteit Leiden); 11359 : R. O'Connell (University of Virginia); 11563 , and 12007 : G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz); 12060 , 12061 , and 12062 : S. Faber (University of California, Santa Cruz); 12177 : P. van Dokkum (Yale University). 12498 : R. Ellis (University College London) 12534 : H. Teplitz (California Institute of Technology) 12866 : M. Swinbank (Durham University) 12990 : A. Muzzin (York University) 13872 : P. Oesch (Observatoire de Geneve) 14088 : E. Vanzella (INAF)

The HLF team members include: G. Illingworth and D. Magee (University of California, Santa Cruz), K. Whitaker (University of Connecticut), R. Bouwens (Leiden University), P. Oesch (University of Geneva), P. van Dokkum (Yale University), I. Labbe (Swinburne University), B. Holden (University of California, Santa Cruz), M. Franx (Leiden University), and V. Gonzalez (Universidad de Chile).