Overwhelmed. That’s how I feel when I zoom into this new panorama of the Andromeda galaxy. Yesterday it was the mind-blowing new photo of the Pillars of Creation. Today isthis view of Andromeda with over 100 million stars in it. Yes, that is not noise. Each of those dots is a star!
You really have to expand and zoom in (use your browser zooming or pinch your trackpad) to appreciate the stunning detail.
From NASA:
The largest NASA Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, this sweeping bird’s-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) is the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, The Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy’s pancake-shaped disk. It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. And there are lots of stars in this sweeping view — over 100 million, with some of them in thousands of star clusters seen embedded in the disk.
I don’t know what they are doing with the Hubble, but holy crap it’s really delivering amazing images lately.
