On October 15, ESA and NASA’s Euclid space telescope revealed a stunning mosaic of the night sky at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan. The mosaic, captured by the Euclid space telescope, represents just 1% of the entire sky. The telescope observed 132 square degrees of the southern sky, an area 500 times larger than the full moon. This data is based on 260 observations made from March 25 to April 8, spanning two weeks.

The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared a 208-gigapixel mosaic of images, that represents only 1% of the wide sky survey that the Euclid space telescope will conduct over 6 years. This mosaic has captured approximately 100 million stars and galaxies. The interesting part is that you can zoom in on the mosaic to see detailed images captured by Euclid’s sensitive cameras during this observation.

The first mosaic image highlights the incredible potential of this powerful space telescope. One of the key features of the image is the faint white clouds of gas and dust, called Galactic Cirrus, demonstrating the telescope’s ability to capture detailed views of the cosmos using its super powerful visible light camera.

The Euclid space telescope was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) with contributions from NASA in 2023. Its main purpose is to study the accelerating rate of the expansion of the universe and the influence of dark matter and dark energy on this expansion rate. The Euclid space telescope aims to observe the shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light years and create the largest cosmic 3D map ever.