Overview
- Euclid turned its visible-light camera to the galactic bulge for 26 cumulative hours on March 23, 2025 and stitched nine pointings into a mosaic that resolves about 60 million individual stars.
- The European Space Agency released the colorized image to the public on June 24, 2026 and has made the dataset available for community and cross-mission analysis.
- The original black-and-white Euclid frames were colorized using observations from the Canada‑France‑Hawaii Telescope, revealing dust lanes, clusters and 51 previously known planetary systems.
- Because microlensing events need roughly 20 days of continuous monitoring, Euclid’s single-day snapshot found no new microlensing detections but establishes a precise pre-event reference for NASA’s Roman telescope and ground surveys to confirm planets and measure their masses.
- Scientists say the mosaic will also enable studies of stellar motions, binary systems, brown dwarfs and Galactic dust and will help cross-calibrate time-domain surveys that follow up on Roman’s exoplanet search.