In late 1995, researchers trained the Hubble Space Telescope on a speck-sized spot in the sky to produce this "deep field" view of the heavens – the most detailed optical view ever taken of the universe. Although the10-day observation covers just a fraction of the sky, researchers consider it fairly representative of the universe, which statistically looks largely the same in all directions. In this particular view, researchers found a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution. Most are nearly four billion times fainter than can be seen with the human eye, and date back to nearly the beginning of time. In that sense, this image is like using a time machine to look into the past to witness the early formation of galaxies, perhaps less than one billion years after the universe's birth in the Big Bang.