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The Andromeda galaxy, a spiral galaxy, spreads across the width. It is tilted nearly edge-on to our line of sight so that it appears as an extreme oval on its side. The borders of the galaxy 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 filamentary 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. Hubble's sharp vision distinguishes 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.

Hubble M31 PHAT+PHAST Mosaic (42208 x 9870)

This is the largest photomosaic ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light-years away. 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 galaxy is so close to us, that in angular size it is six times the apparent diameter of the full Moon, and can be seen with the unaided eye. For Hubble's pinpoint view, that's a lot of celestial real estate to cover. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars. That's still a fraction of Andromeda's population. And the stars are spread across about 2.5 billion pixels. The detailed look at the resolved stars will help astronomers piece together the galaxy's past history that includes mergers with smaller satellite galaxies.

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