NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has captured a stunning panoramic view of the Milky Way's closest celestial neighbor, which is schedule to collide with our own galaxy in approximately 4.5 billion years.
The incredible image has been posted to NASA and the European Space Agency's (ESA) social channels as well as its website's where it's detailed the image is comprised of a ridiculous 2.5 billion pixels. For those that don't know, Andromeda is located approximately 2.5 million light-years away, and the image is actually a more than 10 year effort by the Hubble Space Telescope which snapped approximately 600 different fields of view of Andromeda.
Notably, the image shows the galaxy "almost edge-on," or tilted 77 degress relative to Earth's view. Because of our position Hubble was required to orbit Earth more than 1,000 times to gather the images required to piece this behemoth together.

Representatives from the European Space Agency said it "was a herculean task" to gather the images and piece them together, but once complete, researchers have now created a record-breaking mosiac image of Andromeda, which contains a staggering 2.5 billion pixels. The image has captured 200 million stars, but researchers estimate Andromeda could as many as 1 trillion stars, which would mean it has 10 times the number of stars than our own Milky Way galaxy.
"Without Andromeda as a proxy for spiral galaxies in the universe at large, astronomers would know much less about the structure and evolution of our own Milky Way," the ESA representatives wrote