60 million stars shine in Euclid telescope's new image of the Milky Way

The European Space Agency on Wednesday released the largest and most detailed visible-light image of the Milky Way's center. The picture shows more than 60 million stars in the galactic bulge, glistening along with nebulae and star clusters. It is a mosaic of nine separate pointings, each covering a patch of sky somewhat larger than a full Moon.

The image came from Euclid, an ESA space telescope launched in 2023 to map billions of distant galaxies and study dark matter and dark energy. Astronomers directed the telescope to turn briefly toward the bright galactic bulge, a target outside its main survey. Euclid recorded the mosaic on March 23, 2025, in about 26 hours.

Euclid's visible-light camera can distinguish individual stars in the crowded bulge without saturating. Its sharpness matches the Hubble Space Telescope's wide-field camera, but each Euclid pointing covers an area 270 times larger. Photographing the same region from the ground with the Keck Observatory would take roughly 2,000 hours, writes Wired's Marta Musso.

Earlier Euclid releases have included deep-field images of distant galaxies and a catalog of gravitational lenses. Heading up soon is NASA's Nancy Roman Space Telescope, ready to go planet hunting.

For a taste of the sheer density of stars observed, check out this zoomed-in fragment of the enormous image:

Here's the ESA's video announcing the release:

ESA's Euclid captures the Milky Way's crowded heart [ESA]