Overview
- Euclid pointed its visible-light camera at the galactic bulge for 26 cumulative hours on March 23, 2025, and the assembled nine-pointing mosaic was released publicly on June 24, 2026.
- The image resolves more than 60 million individual stars across nine fields each larger than the full Moon and includes 51 previously known planetary systems.
- Euclid captured the original exposures in black and white and the team later added color using observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and processing by the Euclid/CEA teams.
- Because the observation was a short snapshot, the data contain no new microlensing events since those typically require about 20 days of continuous monitoring, but the mosaic records star positions before future alignments.
- The mosaic gives Roman and ground-based microlensing surveys a precise historical baseline that will help confirm planets, measure their masses, track stellar motions, and support studies of dust, binaries and faint objects in the crowded Galactic centre.