Not every important space science photo is as beautiful as the next. In fact many telescopes prove their mettle without ever producing a picture that non-scientists would care to look at.

And even Hubble does a little photography that's not up to its own standards of beauty now and then. This image, called the Hubble Deep Field, was designed to do more than just look pretty.

When it was released in 1996, the image was billed as our deepest look ever into the universe, perhaps as far away and as far back in time as just 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The galaxies are so far away that some are nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision.

The picture covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon. But because researchers think the universe is structured similarly in all directions, this view of a narrow patch of sky has a wider purpose.

"The Hubble Deep Field is also sort of the universe's wallpaper -- whatever direction you look the universe should resemble this pattern of a sea of seeming endless galaxies," Villard said. "What's staggering is that each little blob is the combined light of 100 billion stars."

Our Sun is but one of many, many points of light.