A little context

There's at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe. You can't picture that, but you can picture 10,000 galaxies -- or rather, the Hubble Telescope can and did. In 2003/2004, it took 11 days worth of pictures of a tiny, "starless" chunk of the "sky", a visual field equivalent to one-tenth of the moon as seen from Earth. The picture spans more space and time than any other picture ever taken: the most distant red blips may be 12 billion years old, and thus 12 billion light-years away. There are a handful of our Milky Way stars, with tell-tale light crosses, getting in the way, but almost everything else here is a galaxy. Each little whorl, blob, and dot: an entire galaxy -- many, like the Milky Way, containing billions of suns and planets.

Click on it to see a bigger image.