This Is the Richest, Most Colorful Picture of the Universe Ever

Gaze upon the vastness of creation, ye mighty, and despair.

The Hubble telescope may be on its last legs — it's expected to cease functioning sometime between 2014 and 2020 — but for now, the trusty 24-year old orbital camera is still sending back scenes of unsurpassing beauty in the heavens. Such as this picture NASA released Tuesday, a photograph 11 years in the making:

What are we looking at here? Some 10,000 galaxies. Light that goes back 12 billion years, almost all the way to the beginnings of the universe (take that, Creationists). And an image that, for the first time, stretches across the full spectrum of light, from infra-red to ultra-violet, catching what looks like just about every frequency in between Read more...