The Euclid Mission

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What we tiny insignificant creatures can stare into when we send out wee machines off this planet is mind boggling.

This image shows an area of the mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on October 15, 2024. The area is zoomed in 150 times compared to the large mosaic. On the left of the image, Euclid captured two galaxies (called ESO 364-G035 and G036) that are interacting with each other, 420 million light-years from us. On the right of the image, galaxy cluster Abell 3381 is visible, 678 million light-years away from us. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi

The huge mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on October 15, 2024, accounts for 1% of the wide survey that Euclid will capture over six years. The location and actual size of the mosaic on the Southern Sky is shown in yellow. This all-sky view is an overlay of ESA Gaia’s star map from its second data release in 2018 and ESA Planck’s dust map from 2014.
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA/Planck Collaboration
Not only can we have our machines look for us, unencumbered by our skin thin atmosphere, they send back, across the seemingly emptiness of space, data that is both used to produce astounding images but also used by very clever people and more machines to explain to us all, "What is out there?"

It's humbling, astounding, and incredible, what the human species is doing.

Oh, and one last how frickin' cool is that, I'm sitting on a bench overlooking an AoNZ beach listening to music as I share all this news with the world.

Humans with machines are astounding.

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