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100 Million Stars Shine in Hubble Telescope's Largest Image Ever

Assembled from 7,398 exposures, the image depicts our neighboring Andromeda galaxy in unprecedented detail.

Screencap of the hi-res image. Click to see the full resolution composite. NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, B.F. Williams, and L.C. Johnson (U. of Washington), the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) team, and R. Gendler. via

NASA released the largest, sharpest composite image ever created by the Hubble Space Telescope on Monday, a photograph comprised of 7,398 separate exposures stitched together to depict our closest intergalactic neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. The telescope captured over 100 million stars in the picture, spread out over a 61,000 light-year swath of space. The image is the largest continuous representation of stars in another spiral galaxy, and NASA says it represents a whole new benchmark for intergalactic photography: the resolution on the image is so high that individual stars and star clusters are visible, despite the 2.4 million light-year gap between the Andromeda galaxy (M31) and the Milky Way. "It's like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand," says the NASA website's post accompanying the image release.

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For the 25th birthday of the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA and ESA/Hubble also released an updated image of the Eagle Nebula, viewable here. Enjoy selections from the full Andromeda representation below, or click on the above image to explore the composite in its full resolution.

A low resolution representation of the full image.

Individual stars and star clusters are visible in this screencap of the high resolution image.

The full photo required 7,398 exposures to assemble. Above: a selection from the original image

H/t Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence

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