This image is released as part of the Early Release Observations from ESA’s Euclid space mission. All data from these initial observations are made public on 23 May 2024 – including a handful of unprecedented new views of the nearby Universe, this being one.
This image is a smaller, close-up cutout from a larger frame featuring the galaxy cluster Abell 2764. It focuses on a bright star lying near to the cluster: V*BP-Phoenicis/HD 1973, a star within our galaxy and in the southern hemisphere that’s nearly bright enough to be seen by the human eye. Euclid’s design and observing capabilities mean that the space telescope can observe very faint objects lying very close to such bright stars without being blinded by the ambient starlight.
[Image description: Hundreds of stars and galaxies are spread over this image against a dark sky. One very big bright star sits in the left of the image. This star has six diffraction spikes coming from a central light-halo. The rest of the image has tiny dot-like stars, and some elliptical galaxies can be distinguished as bright haloes around even brighter dots.]