Euclid: European Space Agency's space telescope captures first image of galaxies and stars

The first images from the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope have been released, capturing a stunning picture of glittering galaxies and stars.

The agency said: "spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more" could be seen in the images, which were released on Monday 31 July.

Engineers switched on the cameras of the €1.4bn (£1.2bn) observatory to begin a phase of testing as the instruments captured a portion of the sky which is smaller than the moon.

Euclid was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July and now has arrived at its destination - the Second Lagrange Point, around 1m miles from Earth on its night side.

It's on a mission to shed light on two of the universe's greatest mysteries: dark energy and dark matter.

The image is in black and white and was taken by Euclid's visible light instrument (VIS) - the development of the VIS was led by Mark Cropper from University College London.

The ESA said the instrument should go on to capture "sharp" shots of billions of galaxies to measure their shapes.

Red images were captured by the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument - measuring the amount of light galaxies emit at each wavelength.

Project manager Giuseppe Racca said after more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid "it's exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images.

"It's even more incredible when we think that we see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning. The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky."

The agency said the pictures early test images were" taken to check the instruments and review how the spacecraft can be refined, and "more detailed" images will be released at a later date.

Once Euclid is set up, it will start building a 3D map of the cosmos in an effort to tie down the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.

Neither dark matter nor dark energy are directly detectable so Euclid will have to use roundabout methods to glimpse their properties through looking for the subtle way their mass distorts the light coming from distant galaxies.