M83 from Hubble

This is definitely the largest and most beautiful image I have processed to date. Hubble took a stunning 6 panel mosiac in 5 different color bands to create this awesome astrograph. I highly recommend checking out the full mosiac hosted on gigapan: http://www.gigapan.com/gigapans/227085.

The Hubble photograph captures thousands of star clusters, hundreds of thousands of individual stars, and “ghosts” of dead stars called supernova remnants. The galactic panorama unveils a tapestry of the drama of stellar birth and death spread across 50,000 light-years.

The newest generations of stars are forming largely in clusters on the edges of the dark spiral dust lanes. These brilliant young stellar groupings, only a few million years old, produce huge amounts of ultraviolet light that is absorbed by surrounding diffuse gas clouds, causing them to glow in pinkish hydrogen light.

Gradually, the fierce stellar winds from the youngest, most massive stars blow away the gas, revealing bright blue star clusters and giving a “Swiss Cheese” appearance to the spiral arms. These youngest star clusters are about 1 million to 10 million years old. The populations of stars up to 100 million years or older appear yellow or orange by comparison because the young blue stars have already burned out.

Interstellar “bubbles” produced by nearly 300 supernovas from massive stars have been found in this Hubble image. By studying these supernova remnants, astronomers can better understand the nature of the stars that exploded and dispersed nuclear processed chemical elements back into the galaxy, contributing to the next generation of new stars.

Image:

Details:

All data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) by the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=12513.

Red: hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f657n_v1_drc-sci, hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f814w_v1_drc-sci
Green: hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f555w-f547m_v1_drc-sci
Blue: hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f336w_v1_drc-sci, hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f438w_v1_drc-sci, hlsp_m83mos_hst_wfc3-uvis_m83-mosaic_f657n_v1_drc-sci

Processing:

• Clip bad data using histogram transformation
• star align to green channel with distortion correction
• Image integrate data to create super lum
• Combine and color calibrate broadband channels
• Enhance RGB and lum with H-alpha data
• ArcsinH and histogram transform Lum
• Masked stretch, histogram stretch, and EZ soft stretch lum
• LRGB combination
• HDR multiscale transform
• Local histogram transformation
• MMT denoise
• Curves transformation
• Unsharp Mask