60 million stars in one image, ESA's Euclid telescope took a look at the Milky Way bulge

ESA's Euclid space telescope is primarily observing distant galaxies to find out more about the nature of Dark Energy. It was launched 3 years ago. Now it took ~26 hours out of its busy schedule to take pictures of something very different: our own Milky Way center.

The image is composed of 3x3 pointings, a total of 4.5 square degrees on the sky. And the overall image contains more than 60 million Milky Way stars, all catalogued and measured now.

Some parts of the image contain also other features in the MW center, here a luminous gas nebula.

Or a cluster of stars, in front of many more stars.

Dust that absorbs some of the starlight behind it.

But overall it's a treasure trove for the search for exoplanets by means of so-called "microlensing". This image will be combined with data to be observed by the Roman space telescope that NASA plans to launch on 30 August this year. And then make a joint analysis.

But you can browse this image right now in detail and see more stars then ever before imaged in such high resolution (Hubble would have taken several years to map this region, Euclid took just more than a day). Best location is ESA Sky: https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=268.42%20-29.08&hips=Gaia+DR3+colour+flux+map&fov=1.6&projection=SIN&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=en&hide_welcome=true&euclid_image=Q2-EGBS-PNG-RGB_HIPS