The Science Behind the Pretty Picture This wide-field view shows the Andromeda Galaxy along with its companion NGC 205 (upper right). (It takes a while to load, but it’s worth it.) Explore (and zoom, and zoom some more!) and you’ll see those 117 million stars, along with a couple thousand star clusters and star-forming regions as well as dark, twisted silhouettes traced by complex dust structures. The result is a detailed look at our neighbor like we’ve never seen before, one best explored via the zoom tool on the European Space Agency’s Hubble site. That’s not too shabby for charting a galaxy 2.5 million light-years away. The stitching is so careful that the mosaic is aligned at the level of individual stars - roughly 117 million of them - or to better than one-tenth of an arcsecond. The team enlisted the help of well-known astrophotographer Robert Gendler, who stitched the images together to create the seamless mosaic. (The photo above shows only the visible-light view through the blue and red filters, a mosaic of roughly 3,700 optical images). The final image includes 12,834 shots from more than 400 pointings taken through ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared filters. The imaging project finished in November 2013, and the team released the result on January 5th at the meeting. Hubble began studying Andromeda in December 2011 as part of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) project led by Julianne Dalcanton (University of Washington). Its 1.5 billion pixels would need 600 HD television screens to display to full effect. The Hubble Space Telescope high-res image above captures a slice of Andromeda spanning 48,000 light-years, from bulge to outskirts.
Explore the high-res version with the zoom tool made available by the Hubble team.
At full resolution, you can see individual stars, even though the galaxy is 2.5 million light-years away. This composite image of M31, the Andromeda Galaxy, is the largest ever assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. The poster is something like 10 feet tall and 25 feet wide - and that doesn’t even do the image justice. The Hubble Space Telescope has turned its ultraviolet, visible-light, and near-infrared eyes to the queen of galaxies, M31, capturing the biggest and sharpest image yet of our neighbor.Īt the winter American Astronomical Society meeting this week in Seattle, a poster of the Andromeda Galaxy welcomes astronomers to the biggest astronomy conference of the year.
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