Stephan's Quintet (2014)

You may be interested in viewing a collaboration between myself and Robert Gendler on this group of galaxies, available here. He also has a good description you can read about here.

I was frustrated searching for novel datasets so I ended up processing Stephan’s Quintet instead of anything new just to have something to do. These large format images are very beautiful but I find them to be among the most difficult to work with. There are a lot of big annular flares and a decent amount of cosmic rays to contend with this time. Anyway, this is one of the coolest groups of galaxies in the sky. I think the two galaxies in the center look like they are high-fiving one another.

Note that I did increase saturation for the vivid red and blue areas.

Red: hlsp_sm4ero_hst_wfc3_11502-ngc7318_f814w_v1_sci_sci + hlsp_sm4ero_hst_wfc3_11502-ngc7318_f665n-f657n_v1_sci_sci + hlsp_sm4ero_hst_wfc3_11502-ngc7318_f140w_v1_comb_sci
Green: hlsp_sm4ero_hst_wfc3_11502-ngc7318_f606w_v1_sci_sci
Blue: hlsp_sm4ero_hst_wfc3_11502-ngc7318_f438w_v1_sci_sci

North is almost up. It is 5.2° counter-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.