This remarkable spiral galaxy, known as NGC 4651, may look serene and peaceful as it swirls in the vast, silent emptiness of space, but don’t be fooled — it keeps a violent secret. It is believed that this galaxy consumed another smaller galaxy to become the large and beautiful spiral that we observe today.
Image:
Details:
All data was taken from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=12282
Red: hst_12282_01_acs_wfc_f814w
Green: hst_12282_01_acs_wfc_f814w, hst_12282_01_acs_wfc_f555w
Blue: hst_12282_01_acs_wfc_f555wProcessing:
- Create Superlum by averaging both channels
- Deconvolute lum
- Denoise lum
- RGB combine
- Color calibration
- ArcsinH stretch RGB
- Masked stretch and histogram stretch luminance
- LRGB combination
- Photoshop to remove hot pixels
- Curves transformation
- MMT and curves
- Atrous wavelets and MMT
- Local histogram eqaulization
- MMT chrominance denoise
- unsharp mask