No such thing as time travel? Just look up!

I am probably telling you something you already know? I was just out looking through my telescope, however the conditions are not the best for viewing at the moment, so I just stood in the garden, starring up at the stars, thinking how amazing they are but also knowing that I was actually looking into the past.  When we look into the night sky, we see things as they were long ago, not as they are today. 
The investigation of deep space is also an exploration of deep time, how awesome is that!

Light is the fastest entity in the universe, but it does take time to reach us from the far reaches of space.  We see celestial objects as they were when they released the light that has subsequently travelled across the universe and reached our telescopes.

The further away an object is, the further back in time we see it, and unsurprisingly, the more distant an object is, the fainter the light.  As we push at the boundaries of time, it becomes that much harder to discern the objects in question, but we can see the dim and tiny glints of light from objects that existed more than thirteen billion years ago, when the universe was a fraction of its current age.

During the past few years, the Hubble Space Telescope has obtained long-exposure images of the faintest objects ever detected.  Some of these are galaxies in their early stages, when they were rich in young, hot stars.  To look even back through time, we will need a new generation of telescopes that can detect extremely low intensities of infrared light from the faintest and weakest end of the spectrum resolvable to telescopes with mirrors and lenses.

Even though that light was emitted in visible energies, it has been stretched by the expansion of the universe, and so appears to us as infrared light. 

Check out the Hubble website for some truly amazing pictures.

http://hubblesite.org  http://www.space.com/18317-universe-first-stars-light-seen.html