Hickson Compact Group 40 from Hubble

NASA is celebrating the Hubble Space Telescope’s 32nd birthday with a stunning look at an unusual close-knit collection of five galaxies, called The Hickson Compact Group 40. This menagerie includes three spiral-shaped galaxies, an elliptical galaxy, and a lenticular (lens-like) galaxy. Somehow, these different galaxies crossed paths in their evolution to create an exceptionally crowded and eclectic galaxy sampler. Caught in a leisurely gravitational dance, the whole group is so crowded that it could fit within a region of space that is less than twice the diameter of our Milky Way’s stellar disk.

Image:

Click for full quality: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52167942406_e96ed053f1_o.png

Details:

All data was taken from the HST proposal 16848 (C. Britt). More info on the data here: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=16848

Processing:

  • Cropped color channels
  • Contiuum subtracted H-alpha data
  • Added subtracted data to red
  • Combined RGB channels
  • Extracted synth lum
  • Deconvoluted synthetic luminance
  • Denoised RGB and Luminance
  • Stretched lum using GHS
  • Stretched RGB using ArcsinH and GHS
  • LRGB combination

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