Long filaments of ionized hydrogen gas (pink) extending 110,000 light years above the disk of the NGC 4388. Image courtesy Subaru Telescope, Mauna Kea, Hawaii. (NOTE: the long gray straight lines are actually detector artefacts.)
Stare into space long enough, with strong enough eyes at many wavelengths, and eventually you find things that look like the events happening in this image. This is an action shot, capturing a scene from the evolution of a galaxy. A supermassive black hole at the heart of the galaxy is devouring material. This accretion produces vast amounts of energy that outshine the light from all the stars in the galaxy. The surrounding gases are “excited” by the action, resulting in ionization. Light at a specific wavelength is emitted, allowing astronomers to see it.
When we say it’s an exciting universe, we aren’t just talking about cool stuff happening. The processes that heat gases and cause light to shine out across the parsecs so we can see it belie some of the most interesting and energetic events in the cosmos. Astronomy seeks to understand those processes and events. And that’s why snapshots like this one are so important. Build up enough of them and you start to get a feel for what’s happening in the cosmos–and why.
Ever wonder how scientists get those gorgeous images from HST and other observatories? The information comes as a series of ones and zeros down a data pipeline, is “massaged” to calibrate the data, and then put through some imaging processing to make the pictures look “pretty.”
Recently the Space Telescope Science Institute made available a software plug-in for Adobe® Photoshop that lets you take their raw images and craft astronomical artwork for your own computer. Here’s the press release and links:
PROCESS ASTRONOMICAL IMAGES ON YOUR HOME COMPUTER JUST LIKE THE EXPERTS
Anyone with a desktop computer running Adobe® Photoshop® or Adobe Photoshop Elements software can try their hand at crafting astronomical images as beautiful as Hubble Space Telescope’s. A free software plug-in being released today for Photoshop makes the treasure of archival astronomical images and spectra from Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory and many other famous telescopes accessible to home astronomy enthusiasts.
Imaging scientists at NASA, The European Space Agency and the European Southern Observatory developed the free software, called the Photoshop FITS Liberator. The term FITS stands for File Image Transfer Software. This single file format archives nearly all images of stars, nebulae and galaxies produced by major telescopes around the world. Until now this file format has been accessible to very few people other than the scientists themselves using highly specialized image processing tools. The ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator will be released today and is freely available for download from: here.
Courtesy STScI
This is an example created using the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator. The image of a portion of the ring galaxy AM0644-741 was made using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Top: original black and white images obtained through filters isolating red, green and blue light. Middle: the separate images reassigned the primary colors red, green and blue. Bottom: the combined full color image.
Electronic images and additional information are available at:
http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/nuggets/1089291600
http://www.spacetelescope.org/
