"The original Hubble Deep Field was the deepest image mankind had ever taken out across the universe, literally back in time," said a senior project scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. "That was the first time we really drove the Hubble Space Telescope to its limits in terms of its ability to see extremely faint objects extremely far away." Over 10 consecutive days in December 1995, Hubble and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 stared at a speck of sky no bigger than a grain of sand held at arm's length. Soaking in the paltry traces of light (four-billion times fainter than can be seen by the human eye), the camera generated 342 separate images. When all 342 were combined, the resulting image pulled back the curtain on a part of the universe no one had seen before and few had imagined. ”You have got to appreciate that the Hubble Deep Field was taken of a part of the sky that was purposefully chosen to be as empty as people could imagine". "Astronomers looked at ground-based images of that little part of the sky and said it was basically black - there wasn't anything there. And then you take this Hubble Deep Field and suddenly you see that it is not empty at all. It is filled with thousands of galaxies of every kind imaginable".