By Mark Prigg For Dailymail.com
Published: 19:34 GMT, 7 January 2019 | Updated: 19:52 GMT, 7 January 2019
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The most detailed image yet of a 40 billion star neighbouring galaxy has been captured by the Hubble Space Telescope.
The Triangulum Galaxy, located three million light years away from the Milky Way, is one of the most distant objects visible to the naked eye.
Under dark-sky conditions, it appears as a faint, blurry object in the constellation of Triangulum (the Triangle) and is a target for amateur astronomers.
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The Triangulum Galaxy, also known as Messier 33. The image, the most detailed yet of the 40 billion star galaxy, is a composite of about 54 different pointings with Hubble's advanced camera for surveys. The mosaic of the Triangulum Galaxy showcases the central region of the galaxy and its inner spiral arms.
The unprecedentedly detailed portrait of Triangulum is composed of 54 Hubble fields of view stitched together, revealing nearly 25 million individually resolved stars.
The borders of individual Hubble images trace the jagged edge of the mosaic, which spans 19,400 light-years across.
Striking areas of star birth glow bright blue throughout the galaxy, particularly in beautiful nebulas of hot, ionized hydrogen gas like star-forming region NGC 604 in the upper left.
But in a new 665-million pixel image taken by the Nasa/European Space Agency (ESA) Hubble Space Telescope, the spiral galaxy's billions of stars are brightly showcased.
The spectacular vista is in fact a giant mosaic, formed from 54 separate images created by Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys.
As the second-largest image ever released by Hubble, it encompasses the central region of the galaxy and its inner spiral arms.
Millions of stars, hundreds of star clusters and bright nebulae are visible.
Triangulum, also known as Messier 33 or NGC 598, is part of the Local Group - a collection of more than 50 galaxies, including the Milky Way, that are bound together by gravity.
According to the ESA, it is the group's third-largest galaxy, but also its smallest
