In 1994 , the director of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore , Maryland , target the Hubble Space Telescope at a sorry and seemingly empty patch of sky for 100 hour .
When Hubble was launched in 1990 , like with the JWST , its capabilities were n’t immediately unmortgaged . onward of being turned on , astronomersattempted to analyzewhat objective it would be capable to see , base on what we know of ground telescope . One newspaper frominfluential astronomerJohn Bahcallarguedthat the telescope would not be capable to see distant galaxies that we had not already seen from scope on Earth .
But in May and June of 1994 , Robert Williams , an astronomer who proceed on to be President of the International Astronomical Union , looked at wide field pic taken with the camera at a wide range of wavelength , and believed it demonstrate more removed objects could be captured by Hubble . Williams was in charge of 10 percent of Hubble ’s operational time , as conductor of the Space Telescope Science Institute , and decided to essay its capabilities further , point the scope at a patch of sky for a recollective exposure prison term to see if it discover more distant object , further into the past tense .
" We did n’t eff what was there , and that was the whole purpose of the observation , fundamentally – to get a core sampling of the universe,“Williams saidat the clock time . " You do the same affair if you ’re trying to understand the geology of the world : Pick some typical spot to practise down to assay to read exactly what the various layers of the Earth are and what they intend in terms of its geological history . "
The team needed to look at a speckle of glowering sky with no other nearby objects that could ruin the vulnerability , ruling out everything on the plane of our own extragalactic nebula . So too were any stars that the Earth or Moon would pass in front of during the pic . Eventually , they settle on an orbit just about the size of a pin heading held an limb ’s length aside , near the Big Dipper in the configuration Ursa Major .
The point of sky , which seem relatively empty from ground telescopes , proved to be anything but . When Williams bespeak the telescope at it for 100 hours , the event was the Hubble Deep Field , the deepest aspect of the existence up to that decimal point , and the furthest back into the past times that humanity had ever seen . It was , of course , filled with galaxies , including I that could not be picture by ground - based telescopes , and entropy about the province of the universe billions of years in the past times .
