Here's The Sharpest Image Ever Of The Galaxy Next Door

Suddenly iPhone panoramas feel less impressive.

NASA released its largest Hubble Space Telescope image composite ever, and it's of the Andromeda galaxy, our neighbor that's about 2.5 million light-years away.

Here's the panorama in its entirety — which shows more than 100 million stars — and below you can see each segment up close.

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, BF Williams, and LC Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler / Via nasa.gov

It's the sharpest composite image yet, with 7,398 exposures taken over 411 individual pointings. To give you a sense of its magnificence, NASA likens it to taking a picture of the beach and resolving individual grains of sand.

Starting from the left:

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, BF Williams, and LC Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler / Via nasa.gov

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, BF Williams, and LC Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler / Via nasa.gov

NASA, ESA, J. Dalcanton, BF Williams, and LC Johnson (University of Washington), the PHAT team, and R. Gendler / Via nasa.gov

The image has more than 1.5 billion pixels, which would require roughly 600 HD TVs to display, if you were thinking about it.