On March 9 in 2011
The giant elliptical galaxy in the center of this image is the most massive and brightest member of galaxy cluster Abell 2261. More than a million light-years wide, the galaxy is about 10 times bigger than our Milky Way galaxy.
I think about this image a lot. There are hundreds of galaxies in this single frame, each one a system of billions of stars, and Hubble caught all of them in one shot. That is a lot of data points in one picture.
It reminds me why I care about data science. Not every dataset fits neatly into a model. Sometimes the most interesting thing is just learning to see what is actually there, the same way Hubble had to point at a patch of sky that looked empty and wait.
NASA / ESA / Hubble Space Telescope