My last post was about an image I created using FITS data I got from SkyView. Here's an image from NASA showing a larger view of the same region in space. This is a small area in the celestial sphere, spanning only one minute of arc. It's located in the constellation Fornax, which occupies an area of 398 square degrees. The name Fornax comes from the French astronomer Nicolas Louis de Lacaille, who first formed this constellation and called it Fornax Chimiae ("chemical furnace").
The constellation Fornax can be seen from the southern sky, but the stars and galaxies shown in the image above cannot be seen with the naked eye. They are in what's known as a "dark field," a region where there is not much background radiation. By surveying such regions with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers are able to detect and study faint galaxies in the early universe to learn more about how galaxies evolve.
