In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope was back in business and capturing amazing data on various objects in the universe. Astronomers were backed up requesting time on the new instrument for their research, things at Hubble’s science hub, the Space Telescope Science Institute, were running smoothly. So it came as a bit of a surprise when then STScI Director Robert Williams and colleagues took up more than 200 hours of telescope time in late December that year to captured 342 exposures of a seemingly nondescript part of the sky in Ursa Major. But the resulting image would turn astronomy on its head. Such deep exposures revealed thousands of galaxies in a relatively small apparent space.
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