The Andromeda Galaxy: Close-up View | Hubble

The Andromeda Galaxy: Close-up View | Hubble

This image, captured with the NASA/European Space Agency Hubble Space Telescope, is one of the largest and sharpest images ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy—otherwise known as M31.

Distance: 2 million light years

This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image. It is one of the biggest Hubble images ever released and shows over 100 million stars and thousands of star clusters embedded in a section of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disc stretching across over 40,000 light-years.

Credit: NASA, European Space Agency (ESA), J. Dalcanton (University of Washington, USA), B. F. Williams (University of Washington, USA), L. C. Johnson (University of Washington, USA), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler.

Release Date: Jan. 5, 2015

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