The Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) has been called the most important picture in history. It symbolizes the peak of human curiosity, ingenuity, engineering, technical and scientific prowess, and also the origins of space, time, man, and the creation of existence. (HUDF Shown below; over 10,000 newborn galaxies forming at the beginning of our universe's age of star clusters.) In a risky move, scientists used extremely valuable and expensive Hubble Telescope time to look at a particular patch in the sky known for absolute nothing. this was the darkest, empties, most boring patch they could find. The powerful, sensitive telescope stared at this patch of sky for 10 full days, absorbing light from the patch, one photon at a time. The image which returned after ten days was equivalent in frame to a grain of sand held up to the night sky at arms length; And within this grain of sand, over 10,000 galaxies came into view. Not only was this an incredible image, where in what appear barren space, 10,000 clusters of 400,000,000,000 stars was found, giving light on how many galaxies there could be in the universe, but this image also represents the farthest we have ever looked into space, the farthest we have ever looked back in time, back 13.2 billion years in a 13.7 billion year old universe. The photons collected to make this image are some of the oldest in the universe, traveling at hundreds of thousands of miles per second past nebulas, stars, galaxies, planets, passing through the universe as it aged and matured, to eventual be collected slowly by the giant mirror of the Hubble.
