The Hubble telescope has been taking images of the Andromeda galaxy for years, and now that work has paid off in the form of the we have the largest galactic mosaic of all-time. The project is called PHAT: the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, and the result is a map of that entire galaxy, made from more than 600 images stitched together, comprising 2.5+ billion pixels. That's the big picture, so to speak. But Hubble takes images in X-ray, ultraviolet, and near infrared, too, so this image contains way more information than just what the Andromeda galaxy looks like.
The full image shows us 200 million or so individual stars in the Andromeda galaxy. It is the closest large galaxy to our Milky Way, and is actually moving closer to us. But it's still more than 2.5 million light years away, and won't collide with our galaxy for another few billion years. Read about the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury mosaic and zoom in on some images that tell us about those 200 million stars, at Big Think.
(Image credit: NASA, ESA, Benjamin F. Williams (UWashington), Zhuo Chen (UWashington), L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI))
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