This is not a visually spectacular image as we are usually accustomed. The title gives a hint what this is about. In plain text, it might read 1,000 galaxies in one image but I chose a more artistic way of saying this.

We often struggle grasping the size of the universe, even just for the part which are able to examine, not to mention the possible parts which remain invisible and might never be reachable due to physical principles. Probably all of you know the Hubble Deep Field and successive images alike. My intention was not trying something similar but a different approach: we don't need to use the largest telescopes to realise how much is already visible to us with modest equipment.

I've taken my small William Optics RedCat 51 refractor, which comes with a tiny 51mm aperture and 250mm focal length. Attached to it, my DSLR camera, which just recently allowed me to capture a nice interstellar hydrogen region: The North America Nebula Complex. Based on some database research, I've selected a region in the constellation Pegasus which is rich in galaxies and contains the two galaxy clusters Abell 2666 and 2634. After taking 9 hours of data, I combined it into this image here.

As you can see, it does not lead to a spectacular interstellar cloud image, neither does it show a "large" galaxy. Instead, what matters is the detail: this image contains at least 1,000 galaxies, which are noticeable against the sky background. The revision B will help you to find them. It highlights all NGC and PGC galaxies known within the image's field. Certainly, there are galaxies which are visible but not catalogued.
Nevertheless, as far as I could verify, all highlighted objects are indeed visible. Of course, most of them are far away and only a few pixels in size for this setup. The point for me is that each of these objects is likely a whole world of stars, planets, nebulae and what other wonders we have learned about. They all fit in this single image and all their light has traveled for millions of years while Dinosaurs walked across our planet and even before. Feel free to visit each of them.

I was interested to know how distant these galaxies are. I've consulted the NED to give me all redshift values for galaxies within the frame coordinates. Since I wanted to be careful not to include objects with a too high redshift, I've restricted the search to values of z<0.5 which makes the distance calculation much simpler as relativistic effects shouldn't be too significant here. (when I studied physics I was fit in computing the Einstein field equations but I got a bit rusty. So, if there's a professional astronomer out there reading this, feel free to send me your corrections if my bla bla is too much of nonsense)
To give an overview of the known distance distribution, here's a histogram of those selected objects from the NED:

From the resulting distribution, I would say that most of the objects are somewhere around 100 to 300 MPc, which would be about 300 MLy to 1,000 MLy.

Long story short: there's much to see out there. Feel free to comment as usual!

CS,
Björn