Astronomers are celebrating the completion of a 2.5-billion-pixel panoramic picture of the entire Andromeda Galaxy. The team includes several UC Santa Cruz researchers who made significant contributions to the enormous photomosaic that combines some 600 snapshots taken by the Hubble Space Telescope over more than a decade and 1,

This is the largest photomosaic yet assembled from Hubble Space Telescope observations. It is a panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy, located 2.5 million light years away from Earth. This mosaic took over 10 years to create,

In the years following the launch of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over 1 trillion galaxies in the universe. But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way -- the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31).