This image shows an area of the mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on 15 October 2024. The area is zoomed in 600 times compared to the large mosaic. In this image, a single spiral galaxy (called ESO 364-G036) is visible in great detail, 420 million light-years from us. This image shows 0.0003% of the initial image of 208 gigapixels, that is 1/330 000 of the area of the main Euclid mosaic.

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.

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