Nasa and the European Space Agency have unveiled the deepest view of the universe ever captured.
The portrait was assembled using 10 years of data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and represents the farthest human beings have ever been able to see into the depths of space.
The photo - named the eXtreme Deep Field or XDF - represents just a small percentage of the night sky but captures more than 5,500 galaxies.
Above: the XDF, released by Nasa
While the area captured is just a tiny patch of dark sky to the human eye, repeated imaging by the Hubble telescope has revealed far-off galaxies and stars in tremendous detail.
"The history of galaxies -- from soon after the first galaxies were born to the great galaxies of today, like our Milky Way -- is laid out in this one remarkable image," Nasa said.
The XDF was made by collecting extremely faint traces of light over about 50 days, spread over more than 10 years.
More than 2,000 images were taken, using Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3.
Above: the portion of sky captured by the XDF
It is much more detailed than even the Ultra Deep Field image - which was the deepest view of the universe when it was captured in 2003 and 2004.
The area captured in the XDF is a small patch of the constellation Fornax, the same as the Ultra Deep Field.
But the XDF image is more sensitive, and contains about 5,500 galaxies, many of which are seen when they were still young close to the creation of the universe.
Nasa said that the youngest galaxies captured are seen as they were just 450 million years after the big bang, since the light has travelled so far to reach the Earth.
"The XDF is the deepest image of the sky ever obtained and reveals the faintest and most distant galaxies ever seen. XDF allows us to explore further back in time than ever before", said Garth Illingworth of the University of California at Santa Cruz, principal investigator of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field program.
Hubble was a collaboration between NASA and the European Space Agency. It launched in April 1990, and has since been upgraded five times.