RR Lyrae Stars in M3 (2013)

Sorry if this takes a while to load. It’s a 5.59 MB gif animation. My website may be a little slow. Once it loads, they do twinkle faintly!

M3 is a star cluster and RR Lyrae stars are variable stars which vary in brightness over relatively short periods of time. Hopefully they aren’t too subtle to see dimming and brightening.

I was hoping to create something very similar to the image featured in this APOD with this video.

This is a series of images taken over a period of about 12 hours* of the core of M3 by Hubble. The video itself is grayscale F555W data. The coloration of the stars is NOT animated. It’s just a color overlay. I think it’s possible to generate a totally animated RGB video but I think it would take a very long time and make little difference. It should still be a fairly accurate representation.

*Looking at the proposal, Bailyn requested a 24 hour look at this cluster but apparently only got 12. Too bad! :(

Video animation: F555W data
Red: hst_06805_03_wfpc2_f814w_pc_sci
Green: hst_06805_03_wfpc2_f555w_pc_sci
Blue: hst_06805_03_wfpc2_f336w_pc_sci

North is NOT up. It’s 15° clockwise from up.

Copyright information:
Hubble data is public domain, but I put a lot of work into combining it into beautiful color images. The minimal credit line should read: NASA / ESA / J. Schmidt

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.