The big and beautiful spiral galaxy messier 66 is perhaps one of the most dusty and exciting galaxies to explore. With the recent PHANGS-HST proposal, this galaxy was observed in the ultraviolet, visable, and near-infrared wavelegnths in a way that makes this island universe much easier to understand. First, shining brightly in the infrared are the young star clusters, shown in the image below as blue. Then, in the visible light spectrum, the dust lanes cascading over the stars come into sharp relief. Finally, in the infrared, the light from stars shining in the center of this galaxy glows through.
The distorted spiral shape of Messier 66 most like was caused by gravitational influences with neighboring galaxies. while most spiral galaxies have a nice, even large-scale shape, this particular galaxy looks like it is being laterally stretched.
I highly recommend looking at the full quality image, which you can find here: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/52195133737_ef5e931fa4_o.png
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All data was taken from HST proposal #13364 by D. Calzetti/University of Massachusetts, Amherst. More details here: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?id=13364&mission=hst
Processing:
- Cropped color channels
- 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
- Curves transformation
- Set background level to .03
- LHE
- Unsharp mask