The largest near-infrared
of galaxies ever taken by the Hubble Space Telescope has provided a playground for astronomers
The image is the
result of a project called 3D-DASH and was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3
It spans 1.35 square
degrees of the sky, equivalent to about six full moons, and contains thousands of galaxies.
The aim is to identify
the galaxies worthy of further study by the James Webb Space Telescope and other telescopes in the future.
Rather than taking
one image every time it orbits Earth, Hubble could take eight images using the technique called DASH.
With a total of 1,256
individual WFC3 shots, it took just 250 hours of observing time to complete the entire mosaic.