Euclid’s VISible instrument (VIS) will image the sky in visible light (550–900 nm) to take sharp images of billions of galaxies and measure their shapes. This image was taken during commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused VIS instrument worked as expected. Because it is largely unprocessed, some unwanted artefacts remain – for example the cosmic rays that shoot straight across. The Euclid Consortium will ultimately turn the longer-exposed survey observations into science-ready images that are artefact-free, more detailed, and razor sharp.
The image on the left shows the full VIS field of view, with the zoom-in on the right (showing one detector split into four quadrants) demonstrating the extraordinary level of detail that VIS is already achieving. We see spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more. But the area of sky that this zoom-in covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon.
Euclid’s telescope collected light for 566 seconds to enable VIS to create this image.