Mock edge-on images, in terms of surface brightness in the V band (SB), of our selected sample of 24 Milky Way-like galaxies from AURIGA simulations. For display purposes, we show for all galaxies an area of the same size, of radius 25 kpc and height 10 kpc. Surface brightness was projected into pixels of 0.1 kpc  ×  0.1 kpc size and was Voronoi binned to obtain at least 100 star particles per bin. The region between the two horizontal lines is where the light of the thin-disk component dominates over that of the thick disk (see Sect. 3.2 for details). The region between the two vertical dashed magenta lines is dominated by a central component (the bar in barred galaxies and a classical bulge in non-barred galaxies). Names of the AURIGA halos are indicated on top of each panel.