'Herculean' 2.5-billion-pixel mosaic shows our closest galactic neighbor like never before — and took more than a decade to create

A zoomed in section of the mosaic of Andromeda .

The Hubble Space Telescope has finally completed a stunning mosaic of the Milky Way's closest cosmic companion, the Andromeda Galaxy — having spent more than a decade snapping the spectacular image.

The new image, which was released Jan. 16 by the European Space Agency (ESA), is made up of approximately 600 different fields of view and shows the spiral galaxy "almost edge-on," or tilted 77 degrees compared to how we normally see it from Earth.