How in the world did we get a camera 10 milion light years away from us to take that first photo?
Good question musicman, I hope the following explaination(s) helps;Note: - The sequence of images in this tutorial has been optimized for maximum visual impact. Due to the fact that discrete exponential increments are not always the most convenient interval for illustrating this concept, our artists and programmers have made dimensional approximations in some cases. As a consequence, the relative size and positioning of several objects in the tutorial reflect this fact.
The original concept underlying this tutorial was advanced by Dutch engineer and educator Kees Boeke, who first utilized powers to aid in visualization of large numbers in a 1957 publication entitled "Cosmic View, the Universe in 40 Jumps". Several years later, in 1968, architect Charles Eames, along with his wife Ray, directed a "rough sketch" film of the same concept and finally completed the work (entitled the "Powers of Ten") with the assistance of Philip Morrison in 1977. Other notable contributors to this effort include Philip's wife Phylis, who has assisted in translation of the concept into several beautifully illustrated books that are currently still available through the booksellers.
This came off the same page as the images @ http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/Hubble vs. Webb: How Far Will They See?
As reports Forbes in "Peering Back At The Universe's Past," space telescopes are really acting as time machines. They can watch objects which are so far from us that light has taken billions of years before reaching their mirrors. The Hubble telescope is able to look at events that took place 13.3 billion light-years ago. But the James E. Webb space telescope, currently under construction, and scheduled to be launched in 2011, will be able to see even further and catch phenomena which happened 13.5 billion light-years ago. The astronomers think the Webb telescope might even be able to see up to 13.7 billion light-years ago, when our universe was just 200 or 300 million years old. We are used to see fantastic images from Hubble, without paying too much attention to the characteristics of the telescope itself. So here is a thorough comparison between the two space telescopes.
Before starting this comparison, here are the opening paragraphs of the Forbes article.
Even the universe was young once. Someday soon, astronomers hope to snap a few of its baby pictures. The tool they'll use to do it is the James E. Webb Space Telescope, set to launch into space atop a European Space Agency rocket in 2011. Once it's up and running -- it is now being built by Northrup Grumman for NASA, the European Space Agency and the Canadian Space Agency--astronomers hope to peer back in time to when the universe was a toddler, a mere 200 million years after its birth in the "Big Bang" that took place 13.7 billion years ago.
Space telescopes act like time machines because the objects they look at are so far away that the light has taken billions of years just to get to the telescope, even though that light has been traveling at the speed of, well, light. And while scientists have a good understanding of what happened during the first 100 million years or so of the universe's life, there's a big blank spot in its timeline from that point to about a billion years after the Big Bang. Their hope is to see examples of the earliest stars and galaxies and study their evolution and the production of elements, which in turn leads to better understanding of the origins of life.
What are the hopes of the astronomers who will use the future telescope?
"We have lots of stories that say there should have been a first generation of stars," says John Mather, NASA's senior astrophysicist working on the Webb telescope. These primordial stars -- known as "population 3" stars, would have formed early in the history of the universe out of pure hydrogen and helium, burned for a short three million years or so and then exploded.
"We don't have any direct evidence that these stars existed, but we can see traces of them in the cosmic background radiation," Mather says. That background radiation is a form of electromagnetic radiation that is seen in every direction in the universe, and considered the best available evidence for the Big Bang theory, which holds that the universe came into being in an unbelievably massive explosion more than 13 billion years ago.
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:Hd3GNZD7d44J:www.primidi.com/2004/05/19.html+how+far+can+hubble+see&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=caPeace,
JoeThe short answer just might be the images were taken from Hubble looking out (light years away) and from proportionately working back toward earth.