Together with irregular galaxies, spiral galaxies make up approximately 60 percent of the galaxies in the local universe. However, despite their prevalence, each spiral galaxy is unique — like snowflakes, no two are alike. This is demonstrated by the striking face-on spiral galaxy NGC 6814, whose luminous nucleus and spectacular sweeping arms, rippled with an intricate pattern of dark dust, are captured in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image.
NGC 6814 has an extremely bright nucleus, a telltale sign that the galaxy is a Seyfert galaxy. These galaxies have very active centers that can emit strong bursts of radiation. The luminous heart of NGC 6814 is a highly variable source of X-ray radiation, causing scientists to suspect that it hosts a supermassive black hole with a mass about 18 million times that of the sun.
As NGC 6814 is a very active galaxy, many regions of ionized gas are studded along its spiral arms. In these large clouds of gas, a burst of star formation has recently taken place, forging the brilliant blue stars that are visible scattered throughout the galaxy.
Text credit: https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2016/hubble-spies-a-spiral-snowflake
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Details:
All data was taken by Hubble’s wide field camera from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=12961
Red: 160w
Green: 814w
Blue: 55wProcessing:
- Integrate all channels
- Create superlum
- combine and color calibrate RGB
- deconvolute Lum
- Denoise Lum
- Stretch Lum and RGB
- Combine L and RGB
- Curves transformation
- MMT and Curves transformation
- Unsharp Mask