Triangulum Hubble Mosaic
Data from the PHATTER survey, Primary Investigator: Julianne Dalcanton.
A color mosaic showing the Triangulum Galaxy. It looks very noisy, but the noise is actually individual stars being resolved. There is a warm yellow core, and cool cyan periphery. The spiral is not strongly defined, but still discernible. Splotches of reddish dust are scattered about. Blue clouds of concentrated star formation are seen mainly in the arms. Many, many clusters of stars and globular clusters speckle the image. A few bright foreground stars from our Milky Way are intruding upon the image, but not so many that they are very distracting. At the edge are some zig zagging boundaries where the edge of the mosaic is. Areas which were empty have been filled with a random noise texture that matches somewhat with the galaxy to greatly reduce visual distraction.
I started working on this years ago, but got stuck at some point just not feeling enough momentum to want to clean up all of the artifacts. Finally got through that last week and finished it up. There's a maximum image size of 200MB at Flickr, so this is a 40% resize of the mosaic.
I assembled this mosaic manually, but you can actually download already-assembled mosaic files here from the HLSP page:
archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/phatter
A link to a gigapan is available.
Processing note: Around the edges are places where the image is only two filters rather than all four. Where near-infrared F160W had missing data, it was replaced by F814W data. I applied a Gaussian blur to make it more closely resemble the F160W data. Similarly, where F336W data were missing, I filled those areas with F475W. For that I simply adjusted the curves and added some noise to make the blending nicer. Yes, I actually "degraded" the data in both cases to make it look nicer. In my defense that's way better than faking it, or cutting it off completely.
Red: WFC3/IR F160W
Yellow: ACS/WFC F814W
Cyan: ACS/WFC F475W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F336W
North is about 75.15° counter-clockwise from up.
Triangulum Hubble Mosaic
Data from the PHATTER survey, Primary Investigator: Julianne Dalcanton.
A color mosaic showing the Triangulum Galaxy. It looks very noisy, but the noise is actually individual stars being resolved. There is a warm yellow core, and cool cyan periphery. The spiral is not strongly defined, but still discernible. Splotches of reddish dust are scattered about. Blue clouds of concentrated star formation are seen mainly in the arms. Many, many clusters of stars and globular clusters speckle the image. A few bright foreground stars from our Milky Way are intruding upon the image, but not so many that they are very distracting. At the edge are some zig zagging boundaries where the edge of the mosaic is. Areas which were empty have been filled with a random noise texture that matches somewhat with the galaxy to greatly reduce visual distraction.
I started working on this years ago, but got stuck at some point just not feeling enough momentum to want to clean up all of the artifacts. Finally got through that last week and finished it up. There's a maximum image size of 200MB at Flickr, so this is a 40% resize of the mosaic.
I assembled this mosaic manually, but you can actually download already-assembled mosaic files here from the HLSP page:
archive.stsci.edu/hlsp/phatter
A link to a gigapan is available.
Processing note: Around the edges are places where the image is only two filters rather than all four. Where near-infrared F160W had missing data, it was replaced by F814W data. I applied a Gaussian blur to make it more closely resemble the F160W data. Similarly, where F336W data were missing, I filled those areas with F475W. For that I simply adjusted the curves and added some noise to make the blending nicer. Yes, I actually "degraded" the data in both cases to make it look nicer. In my defense that's way better than faking it, or cutting it off completely.
Red: WFC3/IR F160W
Yellow: ACS/WFC F814W
Cyan: ACS/WFC F475W
Blue: WFC3/UVIS F336W
North is about 75.15° counter-clockwise from up.