The Tadpole galaxy, taken by Hubble and processed by me

The Tadpole Galaxy is a disrupted barred spiral galaxy located 420 million light-years from Earth in the northern constellation Draco. Its most dramatic feature is a massive trail of stars about 280,000 light-years long; the size of the galaxy has been attributed to a merger with a smaller galaxy that is believed to have occurred about 100 million years ago. The galaxy is filled with bright blue star clusters.

Image:

Processing:

I created this image with 3 filters taken by the Hubble ACS camera: near- infrared (814nm), orange (606nm), and blue( 475nm).

  • cropped to remove bad pixels
  • star alignment
  • noise reduction
  • channel combination:
    • R: near-infrared (814nm)
    • G: Orange (606nm)
    • B: blue (475nm)
  • Masked Stretch
  • remove blue bias using curves transformation
  • push galaxy, mute background using curves transformation
  • HDR to bring out detail in the core

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