William Ostling
Peering into the faint outer halo of Messier 83
Full write-up here: theastroenthusiast.com/peering-into-the-faint-outer-halo-...
This is another image from the archives of telescope live – the spiral galaxy M83. I noticed while processing that this dataset was deep enough to include a fainter outer halo that I couldn’t find, so I wanted to show as much of this new halo as I could. It was tricky to balance the brightness of the core with the brightness of the outer halo, but using some pixelmath tricks in conjunction with HDR and GHS I think I was able to do a pretty good process. Given that this dataset was so good, I did a lot of sharpening to it, so the core and dust lanes are extremely clear! This is about 15 hours of data from Chile.
Big, bright, and beautiful, spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, The Southern Pinwheel. But reddish star forming regions that dot the sweeping arms highlighted in this sparkling color composite also suggest another nickname, The Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. About 40,000 light-years across, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp composite color image also features spiky foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.
Website: theastroenthusiast.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/the_astronomy_enthusiast/
Peering into the faint outer halo of Messier 83
Full write-up here: theastroenthusiast.com/peering-into-the-faint-outer-halo-...
This is another image from the archives of telescope live – the spiral galaxy M83. I noticed while processing that this dataset was deep enough to include a fainter outer halo that I couldn’t find, so I wanted to show as much of this new halo as I could. It was tricky to balance the brightness of the core with the brightness of the outer halo, but using some pixelmath tricks in conjunction with HDR and GHS I think I was able to do a pretty good process. Given that this dataset was so good, I did a lot of sharpening to it, so the core and dust lanes are extremely clear! This is about 15 hours of data from Chile.
Big, bright, and beautiful, spiral galaxy M83 lies a mere twelve million light-years away, near the southeastern tip of the very long constellation Hydra. Prominent spiral arms traced by dark dust lanes and blue star clusters lend this galaxy its popular name, The Southern Pinwheel. But reddish star forming regions that dot the sweeping arms highlighted in this sparkling color composite also suggest another nickname, The Thousand-Ruby Galaxy. About 40,000 light-years across, M83 is a member of a group of galaxies that includes active galaxy Centaurus A. In fact, the core of M83 itself is bright at x-ray energies, showing a high concentration of neutron stars and black holes left from an intense burst of star formation. This sharp composite color image also features spiky foreground Milky Way stars and distant background galaxies.
Website: theastroenthusiast.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/the_astronomy_enthusiast/