EMBARGOED UNTIL:  10:00 a.m. CST Monday, January 15, 1996

PHOTO NO.: STSCI-PRC96-01a


HUBBLE'S DEEPEST-EVER VIEW OF THE UNIVERSE
UNVEILS MYRIAD GALAXIES  BACK TO THE BEGINNING 
OF TIME

Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this
"deepest-ever" view of the universe,  called the Hubble Deep Field
(HDF), made with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.  Besides the classical
spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety
of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to
understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may
have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view  all the way to the visible
horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the
diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown here).
This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy
are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more
distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly
four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision.  (The
relatively bright object with diffraction spikes just left of center
may be a 20th magnitude star.) Though the field is  a very small sample
of sky area it is considered representative of the typical distribution
of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks the
same in all directions.

The image was assembled from many separate exposures (342 frames total
were taken, 276 have been fully processed to date and used for this
picture) with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), for ten
consecutive days between December 18 to 28, 1995.  This picture is from
one of three wide-field CCD (Charged Coupled Device) detectors on the
WFPC2.

This "true-color" view was assembled from separate images were taken in
blue, red, and infrared light.  By combining these separate images into
a single color picture, astronomers will be able to infer -- at least
statistically -- the distance, age, and composition of galaxies in the
field.  Bluer objects contain young stars and/or are relatively close,
while redder objects contain older stellar populations and/or farther
away.

This material was presented to the 187th meeting of the American
Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas on January 15, 1996.

Credit: Robert Williams and the Hubble Deep Field Team (STScI) and NASA

Image files in GIF and JPEG format and captions may be accessed on
Internet via anonymous ftp from ftp.stsci.edu in /pubinfo.

                    GIF                 JPEG
PRC96-01a HDF WFC   gif/HDFwf3.gif      jpeg/HDFwf3.jpg

Higher resolution digital versions (300dpi JPEG) of the release
photographs will be available temporarily in /pubinfo/hrtemp:
96-01a.jpg and 96-01b.jpg (color) 96-01aBW.jpg and 96-01bBW.jpg (black
and white).

GIF and JPEG images, captions and press release text are available via
World Wide Web at URL http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/PR/96/01.html, or
via links in http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Latest.html and
http://www.stsci.edu/pubinfo/Pictures.html.