Far Distant

The scientists looking at the universe through the Hubble Space Telescope have had their Extreme Deep Field (XDF) camera for awhile. To mark the 10th anniversary of the XDF, the other day they released some of the pictures it had taken compiled into a view of the universe from almost 13 billion years ago, only 500 million or so years after it came into being.

The picture at the Hubble site contains more than five thousand of the universe's most ancient galaxies, with each galaxy containing hundreds of thousands, if not millions of stars. As the graphic at the io9.com piece shows, those 5,500 incredibly dim and distant galaxies can be found in a piece of the sky dwarfed in apparent size by our own moon.

So if you were thinking that the whole world might be collapsing around you, think for a bit about how you relate to that immensity in terms of both age and size. I've had a couple of pretty long days this last week, and I can tell you, contemplating that pretty much just peaced me right out.