Gaze upon the vastness of creation, ye mighty, and despair.

The Hubble telescope may be on its last legs — it's expected to cease functioning sometime between 2014 and 2020 — but for now, the trusty 24-year old orbital camera is still sending back scenes of unsurpassing beauty in the heavens. Such as this picture NASA released Tuesday, a photograph 11 years in the making:

What are we looking at here? Some 10,000 galaxies. Light that goes back 12 billion years, almost all the way to the beginnings of the universe (take that, Creationists). And an image that, for the first time, stretches across the full spectrum of light, from infra-red to ultra-violet, catching what looks like just about every frequency in between.

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Hubble took more than 840 orbits to assemble this image, staring at the same patch of sky over and over until the ultraviolet galaxies — the hottest form of light — started to show up in the exposure. They're particularly important because they hail from a range of time between 5 and 10 billion years ago, a period of time when we don't have a lot of data about star formation, which also happens to be the period when most of the stars in the universe formed.

And as great and meticulous a shot as this is, it's nothing compared to what we're going to get from the next great space telescope, the infrared-friendly James Webb, launching in 2018. So use this one as your desktop for now, but be prepared to blow your mind with a lot better shots than this in a few years' time.