MEXICO: NASA shows its highest quality image ever comprising 1.5 billion pixels and boasting 1000 times the resolution of a regular high-definition picture.
The large composite image is of the Andromeda galaxy, the closest spiral galaxy to our own galaxy, the Milky Way, which is 2.5 million light years away.
It was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and is 60,000 by 22,000 pixels. At 4.3 gigabytes in size, if you tried to display the whole image, you would need the equivalent of 750 HD television screens.
The significance of the photograph taken by researchers at the University of Washington, is it represents a new benchmark for precision studies of large spiral galaxies. Andromeda was chosen because it is easier to take extreme high-resolution images of neighbouring galaxies than others millions of light years away.
“Never before have astronomers been able to see individual stars inside an external spiral galaxy over such a large contiguous area,” wrote NASA on their website.
