Today’s Image of the Day from the European Space Agency features a stunning image of Andromeda, the nearest spiral galaxy to our Milky Way.

The extraordinary image was captured by ESA’s Flyeye telescope in May 2025 during its first light campaign. This was not just a technical test; it became a powerful demonstration of the telescope’s capabilities. 

Capturing Andromeda in a single frame

The image was produced from 16 simultaneous 30-second exposures, each corresponding to one segment of the instrument’s view. What’s remarkable is that this relatively brief imaging session managed to capture the entire span of Andromeda in a single frame. 

“For a dedicated astronomical telescope such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, viewing the whole Andromeda Galaxy requires stitching together hundreds of individual observations. This Hubble image of Andromeda, for example, took over 10 years and 600 snapshots to make,” noted ESA.

“Flyeye, on the other hand, is a survey telescope designed to see as much of the sky at once as possible, and to rapidly scan for new near-Earth objects. This image of Andromeda takes up just one sixteenth of the telescope’s full field of view.”

Viewing the sky like never before

The Flyeye telescope is a uniquely engineered wide-field survey instrument that gets its name from the compound eyes of insects. The ability to image a vast celestial object like Andromeda so quickly and efficiently speaks volumes about the future role of Flyeye. 

While the telescope was primarily designed for planetary defense – specifically, detecting near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets – it is proving to be a versatile tool for wide-field astrophotography. 

Once the full network of Flyeye telescopes is operational, ESA will be able to monitor two-thirds of the visible sky up to three times per night. This will greatly enhance our ability to detect moving objects, transient phenomena, and changes in the sky in near real-time.

Flyeye represents a major leap in how we scan and interpret the sky, combining the speed of modern survey telescopes with the breadth and automation required for planetary protection and astrophysical discovery. The image of Andromeda, captured so efficiently, is an early glimpse of that future.

A closer look at Andromeda

The Andromeda Galaxy is the most distant object visible to the naked eye from Earth. Located approximately 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda, it spans more than 220,000 light-years across – making it more than twice the size of the Milky Way. 

The galaxy contains an estimated one trillion stars, which is several times more than the number in our galaxy.

Andromeda is on a slow but steady collision course with the Milky Way. Astronomers estimate that the two galaxies will begin to merge in about 4 billion years, eventually forming a single, much larger elliptical galaxy. 

This future collision is not a threat to individual stars or planets, including our solar system, because of the immense distances between stars. Instead, it will be a dramatic and relatively gentle gravitational reshaping of both galaxies over billions of years.

An important object of study

Visually, Andromeda appears as a faint, elongated smudge in dark skies, best seen in the Northern Hemisphere during autumn.

Through binoculars or a small telescope, more structure becomes visible, including its bright core and hints of spiral arms. It has several satellite galaxies of its own, including M32 and M110, both of which are dwarf elliptical galaxies.

As a member of the Local Group – a small cluster of about 80 galaxies that includes the Milky Way, Triangulum Galaxy, and numerous dwarf galaxies – Andromeda plays a key role in our understanding of galactic formation and evolution. 

It has been studied extensively in multiple wavelengths, from radio to X-ray, revealing not only its stars and dust lanes but also a massive halo of hot gas surrounding it and evidence of past galactic mergers.

Andromeda remains an important object of study for both scientists and skywatchers. It gives us a glimpse of what the Milky Way might look like from the outside and helps us understand what could happen when our galaxy and Andromeda eventually collide.

Image Credit: ESA

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