Hubble’s Deepest-Ever View of the Universe to be Unveiled on March 9

Several hundred orbits of NASA Hubble Space Telescope time have been
allocated to making the deepest-ever view of the visible universe. This
Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) is equivalent to a
one-million-second-long photographic exposure and will be unveiled at
the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md. on Tues., March
9, 2004.

This historic image is expected to take astronomers to ‘within a stone’s
throw’ of the the big bang itself, unveiling the first galaxies that
emerged from the end of the cosmological “dark ages” shortly after the
big bang, or when the universe was about 5 percent of its present age.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field as observed with Hubble’s two premier
cameras, the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and the Near Infrared
Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS), will be unveiled to the
news media and public on March 9, 2004 during a live webcast starting at
9:00 am (EST) at:
http://www.stsci.edu/institute/center/information/streaming/HubbleUltraDeepField

News media not at the STScI during the live webcast can e-mail questions
to newsquestions@stsci.edu .

High-resolution images, broadcast quality videos, and other information
will be posted at 9:30 am (EST)/15:30 (CET) on:
http://hubblesite.org/news/2004/07
and
http://www.spacetelescope.org

The science data products will be available to the astronomy community
at 10:00 am (EST)/16:00 (CET) on March 9 on:
http://www.stsci.edu/hst/udf,
http://www.stecf.org/UDF/,
and
http://cadcwww.dao.nrc.ca/hst/