Sometimes a picture comes along that blows your mind. This image covers about the same area of sky as a half moon – yet that tiny patch contains tens of thousands of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars.

I have not actually counted them all – no one has. But I estimate that there are more than 50,000 star cities in the colourful patchwork released today by the European Southern Observatory.

The 27 megapixel picture gives the deepest ever view into the universe from Earth, revealing galaxies nearly 12 billion years back in time. Amazingly, astronomers say the view will be similar across the entire sky since galaxies are evenly distributed.

It was taken with instruments including the Very Large Telescope from Europe’s Paranal Observatory in Chile, a scientific outpost that stars in the latest James Bond movie Quantum Of Solace.

This remote spot in the Atacama Desert is high enough and dry enough to allow images to be taken in the ultraviolet region of the spectrum. It was built up over 55 hours spread across many years.

Some of the galaxies are a billion times fainter than could be seen with the unaided eye. There are only a handful of actual stars in the picture, foreground objects in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The image is of a region called the Chandra Deep Field South and is one that is especially closely observed by astronomers seeking to build a census of what is in the sky.

ESO’s chief press officer, Henri Boffin, tells me the strip shown measures just 14.1 x 21.6 minutes of arc (arcmin). For comparison, the full moon has an angular diameter of approximately 30 minutes of arc.

ESO’s publicity team compare viewing this amazing picture to diving into a pool of millions of distant galaxies of different shapes and colours. You can read their whole release and see the big picture in all its glory here.

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