It took more than 1,000 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope to do so

200 million stars in a colossal photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy

Esp 1·16·2025 · 23:08 0

NASA has released the largest image I have seen posted on the web in the nearly three decades I have been browsing it.

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The image in question is a photomosaic, that is, an image made up of a multitude of photos assembled one next to the other. The image shown in this photomosaic is the Andromeda Galaxy, a spiral galaxy also known as Messier 31 that is about 2.5 million light-years from the Milky Way. NASA notes: "It took over 10 years to make this vast and colorful portrait of the galaxy, requiring over 600 Hubble overlapping snapshots that were challenging to stitch together. "

The Hubble Space Telescope photomosaic of the Andromeda galaxy. The full-resolution image can be downloaded here, with a size of 203 MB (Source: NASA).

To create this photomosaic, which you can see above, more than 1,000 orbits of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope were needed, launched into orbit on April 24, 1990 by the space shuttle Discovery during its STS-31 mission. NASA explains the procedure used as follows:

"This panorama started with the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program about a decade ago. Images were obtained at near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths using the Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field Camera 3 aboard Hubble to photograph the northern half of Andromeda."

NASA has released this photomosaic in two images that can be downloaded from its website:

The photomosaic includes the brightness of 200 million stars. That may seem like a lot, but they are actually just a small fraction of the stars that make up the galaxy, as NASA explains: "The Andromeda galaxy, our galactic neighbor, holds over 1 trillion stars and has been a key to unlocking the secrets of the universe. Thanks to NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, we’re now seeing Andromeda in stunning new detail, revealing its dynamic history and unique structure."

Some details of the photomosaic released by NASA (click on the image to see it enlarged). It includes the following: (a) Bright blue star clusters embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and a pair of bright foreground stars that appear in the photo and are actually within our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206, the most visible star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of newborn blue stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, which may be the remnant core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across a myriad of stars (Source: NASA).

About this galaxy, Daniel Weisz of the University of California, Berkeley, notes: "Andromeda looks like a transitional type of galaxy that's between a star-forming spiral and a sort of elliptical galaxy dominated by aging red stars. We can say that it has a large central bulge of older stars and a star-forming disk that is not as active as one might expect given the mass of the galaxy."

NASA has released this video showing some details about the mosaic. If you can't see any details in the photomosaic or the video, NASA notes that the Andromeda galaxy and our galaxy, the Milky Way, will merge in about 4.5 billion years, so you'll just have to wait a bit to get a better look:

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