HDF-S area in the sky

After the great success of the origninal Hubble Deep Field, later called Hubble Deep Field North (HDF-N), an identical project for the southern hemisphere, the Hubble Deep Field South (HDF-S), was done over ten days in September 1998. With similar exposure times as in the HDF-N the HDF-S was created of a composite of several hundred individual images taken using the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2.

The goal of this deep sky optical image was the observation of the distant universe and extremly distant galaxies in early stages of their evolution. In addition astronomers could study the cosmological principle states that at the largest scales, the universe is homogeneous and isotropic, meaning that it should look the same in any direction. A similar distribution and amount of different kinds of objects was indeed found in the HDF-S as in the HDF-N.

The image presented here shows not only the area of the HDF-S but also its surrounding.