This view of nearly 10 000 galaxies was taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and it is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies (about 100) may be among the most distant known, existing
when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 thousand million years ago, when the cosmos was 13 thousand million years
old.

The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between 24 September 2003 and 16 January 2004.