The Largest Near Infrared Image of outer space

Hubble Telescope that has been in function for over 30 years after it was launched in the low earth orbit in 1990. It is considered as the largest and most versatile telescope ever. It has discovered many secrets of the outer space and even photographed the nearest galaxies and biggest stars. Hubble Telescope is back in headlines after it captured the largest near infrared image ever that is covering a swath of sky eight times larger then old space telescope. This image left humans in shock. Its an image and also a demonstration of a technique that will help scientists better understand the formation and structure of distant galaxies as well as set the target for some advanced James Webb Space telescope. Hubble telescope used the technique of drift and shift. The scientists take several images of the cosmos field with Hubble and then stitched them together to create clear large image. The resulting image had more than 1200 images corresponds to 1.35 degrees of the cosmos field and covers an area nearly six times the size of the moon in the sky. This technique is also more efficient then past Hubble observations, allowing the researchers to take images in 200hours and then stitch the images together to create larger image. Near infrared is the portion of infrared spectrum closest but still outside the range of human vision. So Hubble capturing an image of near infrared cosmos field is like the biggest achievement of Hubble. The cosmos field is an area of sky about two degrees square as seen from earth in the constellation. Astronomers chose it because it affords a relatively clear view of distant and extra galactic space and it also contains few stars and clouds of gas. Hubble is the first one to take the clear and largest image of that region that is known as cosmic evolution survey or cosmos field. In the image there are million of galaxies that can be seen within the cosmos field and some galaxies are as far as 12 billion light years away. Most massive Galaxies are rare object for the ultimate field of study. There are many other images of cosmos field that are captured by other telescopes too that helped scientists better understand things like the evolution of star formation in distant galaxies. But the main issue with those photos is that the observations made by those photos suffer from biases as the field lacks high resolution of near infrared imaging. The new 3d dash technique adds a new layer of unique and new observations in the cosmos fields and also marking its place for the future space surveys. The new image is available for download from the Mikulski Archive for space Telescopes but it is 19 gigabytes and it is indeed a vey large image file. So for those curious people who want to explore the space through the image but don’t want to download that huge image file, they can get an interactive online version of the 3d dash observation that is also available to the public.