The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has captured a tremendous photograph of the spiral galaxy NCG 7329.
This Hubble picture reveals NCG 7329, a spiral galaxy situated some 149 million light-years away within the constellation of Tucana. Image credit score: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Riess et al.
NCG 7329 was first found by the English astronomer John Herschel on July 20, 1835.
Otherwise often called ESO 109-12, IRAS 22369-6644 and LEDA 69453, it resides 149 million light-years away within the constellation of Tucana.
The galaxy is a member of the NGC 7329 group (LGG 462), an meeting of greater than 10 galaxies certain collectively by gravity.
This new picture of NCG 7329 is made up of observations from Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) within the infrared and optical components of the spectrum.
“Creating a colorful image such as this one using a telescope such as Hubble is not as straightforward as pointing and clicking a camera,” Hubble astronomers stated.
“Commercial cameras will typically try to collect as much light of all visible wavelengths as they can, in order to create the most vibrant images possible.”
“In contrast, raw images collected by Hubble are always monochromatic, because astronomers typically want to capture very specific ranges of wavelengths of light at any time, in order to do the best, most accurate science possible.”
“In order to control which wavelengths of light will be collected, Hubble’s cameras are equipped with a wide variety of filters, which only allow certain wavelengths of light to reach the cameras’ CCDs (a CCD is a camera’s light sensor — phone cameras also have CCDs).”
“How are the colorful Hubble images possible given that the raw Hubble images are monochromatic? This is accomplished by combining multiple different observations of the same object, obtained using different filters,” they added.
“This image of NCG 7329, for example, was processed from Hubble observations made using four different filters, each of which spans a different region of the light spectrum.”
“Specialized image processors and artists can make informed judgements about which optical colors best correspond to each filter used.”
“They can then color the images taken using that filter accordingly.”
“Finally, the images taken with different filters are stacked together, and voila!”
“The colorful image of a distant galaxy is complete, with colors as representative of reality as possible.”