Hawai’i Observatories Adding Color to the Euclid Space Mission 

The Euclid mission plans to observe billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky, building a 3D map of the Universe. By observing more than one-third of the observable sky outside the Milky Way, Euclid will image billions of targets out to a distance of ten billion light years. Astronomers estimate the distances to these galaxies – and thus convert 2-dimensional images to a 3-d map of the Universe. Prior to Euclid’s launch, the work of creating the map began in Hawai’i through the UNIONS project, an ambitious imaging survey of the northern sky at visual and near-infrared wavelengths conducted by three Hawai’i based telescopes since 2017: the Canada-France-Hawaiʻi Telescope (CFHT), Japan’s Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, and the University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) Pan-STARRS telescope on Haleakalā, Maui. For more details see the Canada-France-Hawai’i Telescope’s press release.