I finally looked at the exposure time on that famous Hubble deep field photo

Saw someone mention in a comment thread that the Hubble Ultra Deep Field took over 11 days of total exposure time. I figured it was a few hours maybe, not almost two straight weeks of just staring at one tiny dot of black sky. The image covers an area smaller than a grain of sand held at arm's length. That blew my mind because I always thought those galaxies were just captured in a quick shot. Looked it up on the Hubble site to confirm and yeah, it's 11.3 days spread across 400 orbits. Makes me wonder how many more tiny spots in the sky hold similar views if we just pointed at them long enough. Has anyone else been surprised by how long these deep field exposures actually take?

3 comments

3 Comments

james53323d ago

Funny how that works, isn't it. It reminds me of how people think a contractor can just "figure it out" in a day when the real work is buried behind walls and takes way longer to do right. Same with that photo. The crazy part is that tiny speck of sky could have a billion years of history in it and we almost just skipped right past it because nobody had the patience to stare that long. Makes you wonder what else we're missing just because we don't wait long enough to look.

phoenixgonzalez23d ago

a billion years of history in it and we almost just skipped right past it" - that hits hard. The Hubble Deep Field took like 10 days of staring at one empty patch of sky and found thousands of galaxies nobody knew existed. Imagine if they gave up after day 1 because it looked like nothing. Reminds me of all the stuff we scroll past on social media every second without thinking how deep it goes. We need more staring time, less swiping.

james53323d ago

Actually the Hubble Ultra Deep Field from 2004 was 11.3 days, but the original Hubble Deep Field from 1995 was only 10 days... @phoenixgonzalez you're right it took that long, just different missions. The newer eXtreme Deep Field from 2012 stacked over 23 days of exposure time across 10 years of observations. That one shows galaxies from 13.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.