Around 2015, astronomers took on the painstaking task of stitching together Hubble Space Telescope images of this galaxy, but that effort had focused on the galaxy's northern half. Still, however, the resulting image showcased a sweeping view of 100 million stars packed into about 1.5 billion pixels.

NASA recently released images of the Andromeda galaxy, an "enticing empire of stars" that can be seen with the naked eye if weather conditions are just right. About 100 years after astronomer Edwin Hubble's discovered the "magnificent" spiral nebula,

Panorama of Nearest Galaxy Unveils Hundreds of Millions of Stars On a crisp, clear autumn night, you can see the most distant object visible to the naked eye — the stunning Andromeda Galaxy, our Milky Way’s closest major neighbor.