A few questions - since when did the Hubble, which as far as I know was an all-American achievement from design to build to orbiting it and repairing it in orbit become the “NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope” ? I have no problems with the ESA using our hardware and crediting them with the image if it was their doing but it sounds like they own part of it.
A few minutes have passed and I've just answered my own question, according to Wikipedia the ESA did indeed help out with funding since the build phase. Strange that I've never heard about it before.
Two observations - the image we are seeing is static. I wonder how many years, decades, centuries it will take to get enough motion data to be able to map the individual stars we see in this image as a particle cloud and use the observed data to create a motion simulation that stretches over millions of years.
I've also wondered for several years now about the fact that, although we are only seeing a 2-D slice of a 3-D volumetric space there seem to be very well defined areas where stars form chains, arcs and even circles as well as areas where the space is completely empty. While some of the effect is probably illusionary from looking at things in 2-d is it possible that the myriad of stars are acting as markers to show us “something” (not sure what) in much the same way as iron particles line up to show magnetic lines of force. Finally, how much time will we need to get enough parallax from the Earth's motion relative to Andromeda's to generate a 3-d view, although I don't know if this possible given the fact that we are moving toward Andromeda, not parallel to it.
A few minutes have passed and I’ve just answered my own question, according to Wikipedia the ESA did indeed help out with funding since the build phase. Strange that I’ve never heard about it before.
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I bet we the taxpayer paid a much larger share than the ESA. Also, all images since 2004, because of the ESA involvement, are not public domain.