When Hubble processes images, they usually crop to the most interesting part. This image, however, shows the entire area captured by the sensor! The pure black areas in this image are parts where there is no sensor.
This image looks to me more like a painting than a photo. Tho colors, the bulbos shapes, the small details all look like oil on canvas.
Image:
Details:
All data was taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) from the following proposal: https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=8726
Red: hst_08726_02_wfpc2_f673n_wf
Green: hst_08726_02_wfpc2_f658n_wf
Blue: hst_08726_02_wfpc2_f502n_wf
Processing
- Stretch each channel
- combine colors
- A lot of work in photoshop to remove sensor defects
- Colormask + curves transformation
- Local histogram equaliziation
- Unsharp mask
- curves transformation