Daily Telescope: The initial results from Europe’s Euclid telescope are dazzling

Enlarge / Messier 78 is a nursery of star formation enveloped in a shroud of interstellar dust. (credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA et. al.)

Welcome to the Daily Telescope. There is a little too much darkness in this world and not enough light, a little too much pseudoscience and not enough science. We'll let other publications offer you a daily horoscope. At Ars Technica, we're going to take a different route, finding inspiration from very real images of a universe that is filled with stars and wonder.

Good morning. It's May 24, and today's photo comes from the European Space Agency's new Euclid space telescope.

Launched in July 2023, the mission is intended to create a giant map of the Universe, across more than one-third of the nighttime sky. Its big-ticket goal is to help scientists better understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which account for the vast majority of the mass in the Universe—but about which we know almost nothing.