Hubble captures most detailed image ever seen of Andromeda galaxy

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." - Douglas Adams, Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy

One of the largest and most detailed images of the Andromeda galaxy ever created has been released by a team of researchers led by University of Washington professor Julianne Dalcanton.

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The enormity of space is near-impossible to comprehend. This image, despite showing only a small portion of a single galaxy, shows more than 100 million stars - and there are more than 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.

Pan and zoom to explore the image below, or to appreciate it in all its glory, maximise your browser window and view it full screen.

What am I looking at?

This is the largest and sharpest image ever compiled of the Andromeda galaxy, the closest spiral galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way.

This is a tiny portion of a very large sky. The image below shows the portion of the galaxy captured in the interactive panoramic image.

The image below shows the portion of the sky captured in the panorama with the moon as a reference to size if viewed from earth. If it were possible to view Andromeda this clearly from earth, the centre part of the galaxy would look approximately the same size as the moon.

This enormous image was created by the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT), a group of researchers working to map approximately one third of the Andromeda galaxy's star forming region.

Because Andromeda is "only 2.5 million light-years from Earth", it is possible to capture much more detailed images of our nearest spiral-galaxy neighbour than of other galaxies routinely photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope.

This is the first time astronomers have been able to see individual stars from a spiral galaxy in such a broad context.

What can you spot?

The biggest and brightest stars in the image are likely to be stars from our own galaxy, the Milky Way. Individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy only become distinguishable at higher zoom levels.

Viewing the full resolution image at the highest zoom possible (see below) makes it clear just how many individual stars are visible in the image.

With keen eyes it's possible to spot a variety of features including background galaxies, stelar clusters and dust lanes.

Explore below to see what you can find.

How was the image created?

The survey includes 7,398 individual exposures which are "stitched" together to create highly detailed composite images like this one.

It took more than three years to capture all the images used in the panorama which shows the galaxy in natural visible-light colours. Total exposure time for all the images put together was 394 hours.

The full resolution composite image is 69,536 x 22,230 pixels, a total of 1,545.8 mega-pixels. To put that into perspective, viewing this image at its full resolution you would need the equvalent of nearly 750 high-definition TV screens (1080p).

Topics: space-exploration, galaxies, stars, telescopes, the-universe, the-moon, united-states