Hubble imaging visualization
I was curious to see what fraction of the sky Hubble had imaged. Even though around 3.5 million exposures of its 202 arc-second field of view should be sufficient to cover the sky, Hubble was not designed to perform wide field surveys, and in fact its ~1.4 million observations cover less than 0.8% of the sky.
A few features are clear. The wave shaped line is the ecliptic of the solar system, with observations of planets, moons, and asteroids. Many of the blobs correspond to galaxies, including Andromeda and the small and large Magellanic clouds. The darker U-shaped curve through the middle corresponds to the plane of the galaxy, whose dust obscures the deeper field objects Hubble often observes.
I used the astroquery API on the astropy library (https://www.astropy.org/) to get data on every observation Hubble has made. I think I got 936,236 data points in total, though I read elsewhere that Hubble has done about 1.4 million, so I may have missed a bunch. My code can be found here: https://github.com/CHandmer/hubble-observations.
To my pleasant surprise after posting it on Twitter I got some coverage in the astro press.
https://www.universetoday.com/155549/here-are-all-of-hubbles-observations-in-one-picture/
https://www.popphoto.com/news/hubble-observation-composite-casey-handmer/
In my opinion, the Hubble ultra deep field image is still one of the most incredible photos our species has managed to produce.
