The European Space Agency (ESA) recently released a new picture of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, an area known as the galactic bulge. Containing over 60 million stars, the picture, taken by ESA\u2019s Euclid space telescope, represents the largest and most detailed photo of this region to date.<\/p>\n
Euclid observed the area outside of its regular survey in support of NASA\u2019s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope\u2019s exoplanet study. This week, Roman arrived at NASA\u2019s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida, where technicians will prepare it for its launch atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy no earlier than Aug. 30.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The new image \u2014 which consists of nine individual pictures, or pointings, stitched together in a mosaic \u2014 covers a five-square-degree area of sky, roughly equivalent to 25 full Moons. Euclid captured the photo on March 23, 2025, training its camera on the area for 26 hours. The telescope used only its visible light sensor (VIS) for this study, so the image lacks color. ESA used ground-based observations from the Canada-France-Hawai\u2019i Telescope (CFHT) to add color to the image ahead of its release.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n