Hubble Captures Largest Image to Date of the Beautiful Andromeda Galaxy

NASA has assembled the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever. The new picture reveals a sweeping bird's-eye view of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31) that's the sharpest large composite image ever taken of our galactic next-door neighbor.

The Andromed galaxy is located about two million light-years away from Earth. In this case, though, Hubble managed to resolve individual stars in a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disk. It's essentially a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies that dominate the universe's population; never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area.

In this image, Hubble traces densely packed stars extending from the innermost hub of the galaxy, seen at the left. Moving out from this central galactic bulge, the panorama sweeps from the galaxy's central bulge across lanes of stars and dust to the sparser outer disk. Large groups of young blue stars indicate the locations of star clusters and star-forming regions.

Since the galaxy in only a little over two million light-years from Earth, it's a much bigger target in the sky than other galaxies that Hubble photographs. This means that Hubble assembled this picture from several other images; a total of 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings.

The new image represents a huge step forward for imaging galaxies. This ultra-sharp new image reveals the full capabilities of Hubble, and may reveal features that have, until now, gone unnoticed.

The panorama was presented at the 225^th Meeting of the Astronomical Society in Seattle, Washington.

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