This mosaic made by ESA’s Euclid space telescopes contains 260 observations collected between 25 March and 8 April 2024. This is 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture during six years. In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky, more than 500 times the area of the full Moon as seen from Earth. The full mosaic is 208 gigapixels. Until the first official data release from the mission, the highest resolution for download is 11Kx4K.

Technical details: This colour image was obtained by combining VIS data and NISP photometry in Y and H bands. VIS and NISP enable observing astronomical sources in four different wavelength ranges. Aesthetics choices led to the selection of three out of these four bands to be cast onto the traditional Red-Green-Blue colour channels used to represent images on our digital screens (RGB). The blue, green, red channels capture the Universe seen by Euclid around the wavelength 0.7, 1.1, and 1.7 micron respectively. In the image, the stars have six prominent spikes due to how light interacts with the optical system of the telescope in the process of diffraction.

The empty regions within the mosaic were intentionally avoided during the survey due to the presence of very bright stars, which would ‘blind’ Euclid’s sensitive instrumentation.

Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi