A Pool of Distant Galaxies
At one glance, the image above doesn’t look special… a bunch of galaxies, few brighter stars and lots of dimmer stars peppering the image. However, if you click on the image for a larger version, or here for a super large one (32 MB!), you can see that all the dim “stars” turned into galaxies, galaxies much like our own Milky Way which is home to hundreds of billions of stars.
Scroll through the full-resolution image and you’ll see that the galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. These galaxies were a billion times fainter than what your naked eye can see and they are so far away that they are seen as they were when the universe was only 2 billion years old (our universe is 13.7 billion years old now).
This image, released by the European Southern Observatory, and was the deepest ground-based picture of the Universe ever taken. Obtained in part with the Very Large Telescope, the image contains more than 27 million pixels and is the result of 55 hours of observations.
My Dark Sky 