Andromeda Galaxy PHAT Mosaic

This sweeping view of the Andromeda Galaxy covers a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of the galaxy's pancake-shaped disk. Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is powerful enough to see over 100 million individual stars and thousands of star clusters. The complete, full resolution mosaic, with more than 2 billion pixels, is the largest Hubble image ever assembled.

The panorama is the product of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program. This ambitious photographic cartography of Andromeda represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies. This view shows the galaxy seen in blue and red filters as imaged with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys from July 2010 through October 2013.

See the following sources:

• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02/image/a/
• http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2015/02/image/b/