By Dean Murray

A jaw-dropping new panorama of Andromeda galaxy took 10 years to create.

The largest photomosaic of the cosmic wonder was assembled from NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope observations and unveiled hundreds of millions of stars.

Photographing Andromeda - located 2.5 million light-years away - was a Herculean task because the galaxy is a much bigger target in the sky than the galaxies Hubble routinely observes, which are often billions of light-years away.

The full mosaic was carried out under two Hubble observing programs and required over a thousand Hubble orbits, spanning more than a decade.

ESA said: "It took more than 10 years to collect data for this colorful portrait of our neighboring galaxy and was created from more than 600 snapshots. This stunning, colorful mosaic captures the glow of 200 million stars, and is spread across roughly 2.5 billion pixels."

In the years following the launch of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have tallied over one trillion galaxies in the Universe.

ESA said: "But only one galaxy stands out as the most important nearby stellar island to our Milky Way: the magnificent Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31)."

The galaxy can be seen with the naked eye on a very clear autumn night as a faint cigar-shaped object roughly the apparent angular diameter of our Moon.

ESA adds: "Though the Milky Way and Andromeda formed presumably around the same time many billions of years ago, observational evidence shows that they have very different evolutionary histories, despite growing up in the same cosmological neighborhood.

"Andromeda seems to be more highly populated with younger stars and unusual features like coherent streams of stars, say researchers. This implies it has a history of more recent star-formation and interactions than the Milky Way."

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