Andromeda Galaxy photomosaic (IMAGE)

University of Washington

Andromeda Galaxy photomosaic

Caption

This is the largest photomosaic yet assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light years away from Earth. This mosaic took over 10 years to create, captures 200 million stars, still a fraction of Andromeda’s population, and contains about 2.5 billion pixels. This detailed look will help astronomers piece together the Andromeda galaxy’s past history, including mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.

Credit

Science: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams and Zhuo Chen (University of Washington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern). Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

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