This is the Hubble Deep Field-South, an exposure taken over ten days in October, 1998.
Click on image for full size
Hubble Space Telescope image courtesy of STScI

Hubble Heads South for the Winter
News story originally written on November 23, 1998

Scientists now have a compliment to the Hubble Deep Field--it's the Hubble Deep Field-South. The HDF-S is a 10-day-long exposure of a piece of the southern hemisphere sky taken in October 1998.

"We have eagerly awaited this new set of images ever since the first HDF, which had a dramatic impact on the entire science of astronomy," said STScI astronomer Robert Williams. "Hubble's deep field views revealed a large, heretofore unseen fraction of the universe and opened it up to interpretation and understanding."

The Hubble Space Telescope looked at a section of of the constellation Tucana to create the HDF-S. The original HDF was taken from a section of space near the Big Dipper. Scientists also wanted the HDF-S to look at a distant quasar to gather more information than they had through the HDF.

The two cosmic "core samples" appear to support the theory that the universe is uniform (on a large scale) regardless of the direction you look. If scientists tried to map the entire sky using the technique they used to get the two deep fields, it would take 900,000 years.

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