Focus on Euclid with Jean-Charles Cuillandre: “What we see in the first Euclid images is a promise of what will come in the future.”

Jean-Charles Cuillandre, astronomer at CEA Paris-Saclay, explains that he was “blown away” when he saw the first full-colour images captured by ESA’s recently launched Euclid space telescope.

Being a specialist of wide-field imaging, Jean-Charles was not only involved in the programme committee that selected the celestial targets for the ESA Euclid’s ‘Early Release Observations’, but he was also in charge of processing the data both for their scientific and their outreach value.

Jean-Charles expected the resulting images to look extremely crispy since they are taken by instruments outside of the Earth’s disturbing atmosphere, but even he was not prepared for the astonishing results. The combination of the field-of-view (the area of sky covered with a single shot of the telescope), and the resolution (the number of pixels in the instruments) are unique for Euclid.

The first five released images therefore show the scientific potential of the Euclid space mission. The Euclid Consortium is responsible to fulfill this promise. More than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan, will try to decipher the dark Universe through the analysis of Euclid’s scientific data.

In this interview, Jean-Charles Cuillandre shares with us his view of Euclid and the elusive dark matter and dark energy. He specifically describes the apparent astronomical objects and reveals the hidden information behind their beautiful appearance.

Be ready to be “blown away”.

Space Team Europe is an ESA space community engagement initiative to gather European space actors under the same umbrella sharing values of leadership, autonomy, and responsibility.

©ESA - European Space Agency

Euclid images
©ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO