Hubble’s operators created a picture (started in late 2003 and finished in early 2004) by repeatedly exposing a seemingly-black point in space about the side of a grain of sand. They took 800 exposures over the course of 400 orbits from September ’03 to January ’04. The resulting image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

A funny thing happened with this photo: there was something there. In that speck of blackness, that speck of nothing in the expanse of space that envelops us, Hubble took a picture of something when given enough time to do it. It turns out that there are galaxies in that void. In fact, in that tiny speck of space, Hubble found ten thousand galaxies.