The newly upgraded Hubble Space Telescope is producing some of the most detailed space photography ever seen, including this shot of the Butterfly Nebula. Previous images of the nebula were not as impressive.

Back in 2004 NASA pointed the Hubble Space Telescope, with newly installed advanced surveying cameras, at an uninteresting dark patch of the sky – purely for curiosity. After 3 months of gathering light readings, astronomers used the results to create the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, the deepest image of the universe ever taken in visible light.

NASA has now created the above 3D fly-through simulation of that same image to give people more context to viewing the 10,000 separate galaxies in the tiny piece of sky.

Bonnie Bassler talked about her research at the TED conference in February revealing how bacteria live in a democracy. They vote on whether to carry out a task based on how many of them are in the same vicinity, tasks like defending our bodies against disease.

This composite image from the Nasa website shows what the sky would look like if our eyes were as sensitive as space telescopes and cameras. The initial photograph has an overlay of a nebula-rich mosaic shot with a total exposure time of 40 hours. The Great Orion Nebula, the Rosette Nebula, the Seagull Nebula, the California Nebula, Barnard’s Loop and the familiar constellation of Orion are all included.