The reaction was pretty much unanimous astonishment, excitement, and wonder. It's interesting that Robert Williams, the director of the project, went ahead with it despite the number of colleagues who tried to discourage him from wasting 10 days of expensive telescope time on what could have been just an empty region of space. The potential for yet another Hubble public-relations embarrassment was huge. There was no guarantee the final images would show much of anything.
I remember reading somewhere that when the original Deep Field image was presented publicly for the first time - at a session of the American Astronomical Society in 1996 - the entire auditorium went absolutely silent at first in pure shock. It was said a lone voice was heard whispering in that silence, "My God...we know nothing." I can't document that, and probably the story was either apocryphal or somewhat dramatized. Nonetheless, it fairly well sums up the overall reaction of a majority of astronomers and astrophysicists.
As far as the rest of the world, well, National Geographic put it like this: "The image now known as the Hubble Deep Field captivated pretty much everyone. To say it was a triumph would be an understatement." (
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/24/when-hubble-stared-at-nothing-for-100-hours/)
The owner of the Deep Astronomy website wrote: "Probably more than any other image I've ever seen, the Hubble Deep Field has profoundly changed my perspective on the universe and our place in it. When I first saw the image, and then learned how it was taken, I was forever changed by it."
That's not even an unusual reaction. The image, and the story of its creation, was all over the mainstream media. Millions of people downloaded it to share, use as their desktop background, or just stare at more closely. It moved people, intellectually and spiritually, some of them in an almost religious sense. Even people who hated science were amazed at how beautiful it was, astonished that what it showed were not stars but galaxies, "strewn like jewels" across infinity.
You might enjoy browsing the book,
Hubble Deep Field: How a Photo Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe (by Don Nardo; with content advisor Dr. Frank Summers, Outreach Astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute). The beginning, for example, describes the scepticism and opposition the project faced, which makes the final result all the more marvelous.
Portions can be read for free on Google Books at
https://books.google.com/books?id=M...ce=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
A few quotes from one news release at the time:
"Gazing into this small field, Hubble uncovered a bewildering assortment of at least 1,500 galaxies at various stages of evolution."
"The variety of galaxies we see is amazing. In time these Hubble data could turn out to be the double helix of galaxy formation. We are clearly seeing some of the galaxies as they were more than ten billion years ago, in the process of formation."
"As the images have come up on our screens, we have not been able to keep from wondering if we might somehow be seeing our own origins in all of this. The past ten days have been an unbelievable experience."
"One of the great legacies of the Hubble Telescope will be these deep images of the sky showing galaxies to the faintest possible limits with the greatest possible clarity from here out to the very horizon of the universe."
The image data are so important (the astronomical equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls, one scientist quipped) they are being made available immediately to astronomers around the world to pursue research on the formation of galaxies and for probing basic questions about the structure and evolution of the universe.
