This is one of my absolute favorite galaxies, so I had to take a shot at processing it! The whirling spirals, the dark dust lanes, the beautiful colors – Hubble really picked a great target!
From APOD’s description (4/21/2011): “The spiky stars in the foreground of this sharp cosmic portrait are well within our own Milky Way Galaxy. The two eye-catching galaxies lie far beyond the Milky Way, at a distance of over 300 million light-years. Their distorted appearance is due to gravitational tides as the pair engage in close encounters. Cataloged as Arp 273 (also as UGC 1810), the galaxies do look peculiar, but interacting galaxies are now understood to be common in the universe. In fact, the nearby large spiral Andromeda Galaxy is known to be some 2 million light-years away and approaching the Milky Way. Arp 273 may offer an analog of their far future encounter. Repeated galaxy encounters on a cosmic timescale can ultimately result in a merger into a single galaxy of stars. From our perspective, the bright cores of the Arp 273 galaxies are separated by only a little over 100,000 light-years. The release of this stunning vista celebrates the 21st anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope in orbit.”
Image:
Processing details:
Data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=12326
Red: hst_mos_1014131_wfc3_uvis_f600lp
Green: hst_mos_1014131_wfc3_uvis_f475x
Blue: hst_mos_1014131_wfc3_uvis_f390wProcessing:
- Crop
- Combine Channels
- Color calibrate
- ArcsinH stretch
- In photoshop, get rid of charge bleeds, hot pixels, and artifacts
- Curves transformation
- Multiscale processing using Curves, MMT, HDRMT, and Atrous wavelets transform
- Histogram transformation
- ACDNR
- Curves transformation
- Saturation adjustment