The goal of this image is to display the details of the nucleus without blowing any details out too badly. This is hard to do if you show the whole galaxy so I have cropped it to the central area. The very center of the nucleus itself is also dust-obscured and appears as a small, yellowish orb near the center of the image. Using only the visible light you might guess that the nucleus is the larger, U-shaped bright area just south of the nucleus. The dust has a way of confusing things like that. If you look at only the near-IR dataset, all is clear and the nucleus is easily revealed.
The H-alpha (red sections) were added by continuum subtracting from the w814 filter and then re-adding.
Image:
Details:
All data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/m83mos/
Red:F657N, F814W
Green:F555W-F547M
Blue: F502N, F438W, F336W Processing:
- Contiuum subctract narrowband
- denoise pure narrowband
- combine channels
- color calibration
- stretch
- curves transformation
- exponential transformation
- noise reduction
- sharpening