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Photo mosaic of Andromeda galaxy and five regions of interest. A spiral galaxy spreads across the width. It’s tilted nearly edge-on to our line of sight, appearing as an extreme oval on its side. Its borders are jagged because the image is a mosaic of smaller, square images. The outer edges are blue, while the inner two-thirds are yellowish with a bright, central core. Dark, dusty clouds wrap around the outer half of the galaxy’s disk. At 10 o'clock, a smaller dwarf elliptical galaxy forms a fuzzy, yellow blob. There are about 200 million stars within the image. The background of space is black. There are what appears to be steps toward the bottom, mainly toward the middle, which indicates where no data were taken. Interesting regions: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy; background galaxies seen much farther away; (b) NGC 206, a concentration of bright blue stars; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad yellow stars.

Hubble Compass and Scale Image of M31 PHAT+PHAST Mosaic (7680 x 4320)

This is the largest photomosaic ever made by the Hubble Space Telescope. The target is the vast Andromeda galaxy that is only 2.5 million light-years from Earth, making it the nearest galaxy to our own Milky Way. Andromeda is seen almost edge-on, tilted by 77 degrees relative to Earth’s view. The galaxy is so large that the mosaic is assembled from approximately 600 separate overlapping fields of view taken over 10 years of Hubble observing—a challenge to stitch together over such a large area. The mosaic image is made up of at least 2.5 billion pixels. Hubble resolves an estimated 200 million stars that are hotter than our Sun, but still a fraction of the galaxy’s total estimated stellar population. Interesting regions include: (a) Clusters of bright blue stars embedded within the galaxy, background galaxies seen much farther away, and photo-bombing by a couple bright foreground stars that are actually inside our Milky Way; (b) NGC 206 the most conspicuous star cloud in Andromeda; (c) A young cluster of blue newborn stars; (d) The satellite galaxy M32, that may be the residual core of a galaxy that once collided with Andromeda; (e) Dark dust lanes across myriad stars.

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