Last week, Gotthard Stuhm suggested in an Astrobin comment on my Arp Galaxy Compilation Poster that I try to image the famous Hubble Deep Field image area.

From Wikipedia - "The Hubble Deep Field (HDF) is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers an area about 2.6 arcminutes on a side, about one 24-millionth of the whole sky, which is equivalent in angular size to a tennis ball at a distance of 100 metres. The image was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over ten consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995." The HDF image was the deepest space image at the time, and still is one of the deepest today.

So like a dummy I said to Gotthard with enthusiasm , "Sure, I will give it a try!". After all, I have had images in the past which weren't THAT far off of the Hubble, if you squint a bit and stand across the room.

The results are attached in 3 different images. The first image is the full 1 degree wide camera frame view of the HDF image area. The second image shows the outline within the first image of the exact small HDF frame, and the third image directly compares my result with the Hubble Deep Field image.



Well, as you can see, this was a humbling experience. I was shocked at the quality/resolution difference, even though I knew that the optics, atmospheric quality, and imaging time were vastly superior in the Hubble version. I normally would have just trashed my poor result early on, but I processed a final image to show to you how amazing the Hubble technology really is, especially for its time. Plus, it's probably good to be humbled once in a while.

Usually, at this point in my description of a poor quality Astrobin image of mine, I make a comment that additional integration time would have been a big help. But that is not the case here. I could image for a lifetime and still not have anything of decent quality in this "empty" area of space.

All hail the Hubble! And thanks, Gotthard, for the suggestion, even if it didn't quite work out as well as I had hoped.