Figure 1 – Newly release photomontage of the Andromeda Galaxy, Messsier 31, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, from NASA and the ESA.

Earlier this month, NASA released a mind blowing photomontage from the Hubble Space Telescope of the Andromeda Galaxy – a 4.3 Gb file..  This is the largest image ever assembled by the Hubble Space Telescope.  At 2.5 million light years away, Andromeda is our nearest galactic neighbor.  The image resolves something like 100,000 stars.  Truly this is like photographing a beach and resolving the individual grains of sand.  The image was assembled from 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings of the telescope.

To understand the enormity of the project and of the galaxy it is best to view it as a reconstructed flyby.  But I have included a still of the image as Figure 1.  I was amazed as I watched the video.  The individual stars becoming denser and denser.  And yet, Andromeda is a relatively small object in the sky.

Yesterday I was discussing with a colleague about how depressing it is that everything that you do on a computer, create a file or erase a file, contributes to the unstoppable increase in the entropy of the universe, that slow decline to absolute zero and nothingness.  This image puts it in perspective.  Look at that image of Andromeda and imagine all the galaxies out there including our own.  What are we?