NGC 604 Core (2013)

This is a close-up of the center of NGC 604. The previously submitted image was a wide view of this same object. They almost don’t look like part of the same thing! Hubble is amazing but I feel sad knowing we can’t see any new images from Hubble’s defunct HRC. When they named it High Resolution Channel, they meant it. The images it captured were really astonishingly high resolution.

Well, anyway, I can’t say my processing of this is profoundly different from preexisting processing, but it’s still part of my learning process. I was messing around with more noise reducing techniques in Photoshop for this. It’s really hard to get a computer to tell the difference between the fainter stars and the random noise permeating the image. You could sit there and slowly mask each one off and possibly go insane during the process.

Red: HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F850LP_sci + HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F658N_sci
Green: HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F550M_sci + HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F435W_sci
Blue: HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F330W_sci + HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F250W_sci + HST_10419_11_ACS_HRC_F220W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 48.5° 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.