Gigapixels of Andromeda [4K]

It’s huge. That’s what you’re going to say after seeing this crystal-clear image of the universe. The picture of the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest spiral galaxy to our own, is comprised of a mind-boggling 1.5 billion pixels and was snapped from 2.5 million light years away by the powerful Hubble Space Telescope. The composite image is just a small section of the galaxy. Dazzling and jaw-dropping, the picture shows more than 100 million stars and allows astronomers to see individual stars in the galaxy for the first time. To give you a better idea, the full picture consists of nearly 8,000 exposures taken from 411 locations and speeds through a 61,000-light-year-long stretch of galaxy. Each of those white dots is a sun. It’s so big that it requires 600 high-definition televisions to see the whole image, according to USA Today.