Above: An image of the surroundings of the Andromeda and Triangulum galaxy, as published in Nature. These galaxies are located more than 2,500,000 light years away, and the dashed lines mark circles around Andromeda and Triangulum with diameters equivalent to approximately 900,000 light years and 300,000 light years, respectively. All the features visible are faint structures around these two galaxies, that are the left-over "fossils" from Andromeda's formation. Many of these relics are new discoveries, and include various streams of stars, very small ("dwarf") galaxies, and a distortion around the disk of Triangulum which is evidence that it is strongly interacting with its more massive neighbour.

Pictures of the disks of these galaxies, as they normally appear, are overlaid at their positions, and an image of the full moon is included for scale. The image has been stretched so as to show the faint structures more clearly. The picture of the disk of Triangulum is reproduced by courtesy of T. A. Rector