ESA’s Euclid telescope spent a single 26-hour observation staring into the Galactic center and produced the largest, most detailed visible-light image yet of the Milky Way’s bulge, resolving more than 60 million stars. The mosaic combines Euclid’s space imaging with color added from ground-based images and was produced by the Euclid consortium, including researchers at Leiden University. Euclid delivers Hubble-quality resolution over a field of view about 250 times larger than Hubble’s, allowing clear views of dense star clusters, nebulae, and structure in the bulge. The observation acts as an earlier snapshot of a region NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe in coming years, supporting Roman’s planned campaigns. Euclid’s deep, wide image of the crowded central region provides a new dataset for studying stellar populations and Galactic structure within the bulge and for cross-calibrating future Roman and ground-based surveys.
