NGC 4151
The brightly glowing bar portion of NGC 4151 as seen by Hubble. It is a Seyfert galaxy, which means that it has an actively accreting black hole at its nucleus, which presents itself to us as an intensely bright source. The two brighter portions near the top and bottom of the frame are where the bar terminates, and some fainter spiral arms extend outward from them. A widefield view of the galaxy by Adam Block is available to help with context: Click!
Mitchell Revalski of Georgia State University contacted me regarding the possibility of processing some of the objects he is using in his thesis, and I have been looking through the data to see what I can do. What's important in this galaxy are the brightly illuminated and glowing hydrogen clouds near the nucleus. They are a bit difficult to make out in this image because the narrowband filters required to highlight these structures were not available in a matching field of view, but some older WF/PC2 data of only the nucleus was available, so I made use of that in another image.
An article discussing this galaxy using a radio / visible / x-ray light image is available here: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/11-029.html
Data from the following proposal were used to create this image:
A Cepheid-Based Distance to the Benchmark AGN NGC 4151
Color saturation was greatly enhanced for the whole image.
Luminosity: WFC3/UVIS F350LP
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: Pseudo
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F555W
North is NOT up. It is 30° counter-clockwise from up.
NGC 4151
The brightly glowing bar portion of NGC 4151 as seen by Hubble. It is a Seyfert galaxy, which means that it has an actively accreting black hole at its nucleus, which presents itself to us as an intensely bright source. The two brighter portions near the top and bottom of the frame are where the bar terminates, and some fainter spiral arms extend outward from them. A widefield view of the galaxy by Adam Block is available to help with context: Click!
Mitchell Revalski of Georgia State University contacted me regarding the possibility of processing some of the objects he is using in his thesis, and I have been looking through the data to see what I can do. What's important in this galaxy are the brightly illuminated and glowing hydrogen clouds near the nucleus. They are a bit difficult to make out in this image because the narrowband filters required to highlight these structures were not available in a matching field of view, but some older WF/PC2 data of only the nucleus was available, so I made use of that in another image.
An article discussing this galaxy using a radio / visible / x-ray light image is available here: www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/multimedia/11-029.html
Data from the following proposal were used to create this image:
A Cepheid-Based Distance to the Benchmark AGN NGC 4151
Color saturation was greatly enhanced for the whole image.
Luminosity: WFC3/UVIS F350LP
Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W
Green: Pseudo
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F555W
North is NOT up. It is 30° counter-clockwise from up.