ESA's Euclid Telescope Unveils First 6‑Gigapixel Galactic Center Mosaic

The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission, launched on 1 July 2023 aboard a Falcon 9 from Florida and positioned at the Sun‑Earth L2 point, has entered its scientific phase after more than three years in space. The observatory is designed to map the dark universe, measuring the influence of dark matter and dark energy by imaging billions of galaxies.

On 15 October 2024 ESA released a massive mosaic covering about 1 % of Euclid’s planned six‑year survey. The image contains 208 gigapixels and 14 million galaxies, providing a detailed view of weak gravitational lensing across a region of the southern sky 500 times larger than the full moon. In a separate effort, Euclid produced a six‑gigapixel picture of the Milky Way’s centre after 26 hours of dedicated observation, revealing stellar motions, microlensing events and star‑formation processes.

These data give astronomers a high‑resolution window onto the large‑scale structure of the universe and will be used to test general relativity over cosmic distances.