Imagine if you got a glimpse into the earliest stages of your life. Seeing yourself as a baby, throwing tantrums, sleeping, playing and later growing up would be interesting, right?
NASA is experiencing that very sensation after obtaining a photo showing the farthest - and thus, earliest - reaches of the universe.
The photo is called the eXtreme Deep Field, or XDF, and was created by combining 10 years of NASA Hubble Space Telescope photographs of the same patch of sky at the center of the original Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Though it focuses on a small field of view, it reveals 5,500 galaxies that were previously unseen.
The faintest of those galaxies is one-ten billionth the brightness of what the human eye can see on its own, NASA says.
This image, taken by the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) La Silla Observatory shows the gas cloud Sharpless 2-292, part of the stellar nursery nicknamed the Seagull Nebula.
This image shows the 'head' of the Seagull Nebula. The overall nebula spans about 100 light-years, and is about 3700 light-years from Earth.