Which telescope produced the first deep field image released by NASA in 1996?

The Hubble Space Telescope produced the first Hubble Deep Field image released by NASA in 1996.

Astronomers pointed Hubble at a tiny, apparently empty region of the northern sky near the Big Dipper and collected exposures over many hours in December 1995. The resulting image, released in January 1996, revealed thousands of distant galaxies in a patch of sky much smaller than the apparent width of the full Moon.

The image demonstrated that long exposures could expose extremely faint and distant objects, allowing researchers to study galaxy formation across cosmic time. Follow-up deep fields were made in the southern sky and later with improved cameras and broader wavelength coverage.

Hubble launched aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery on 24 April 1990. Its initial blurred vision was corrected during a 1993 servicing mission after engineers identified a flaw in its primary mirror. Hubble’s deep-field observations remain among its most influential contributions to astronomy, while the James Webb Space Telescope extends such studies farther into infrared wavelengths.