UGC 3459 (2014)

This galaxy has been described by astronomers as having a low surface brightness. Can’t disagree, there! It looks like a nice, big spiral, but what’s going on? It’s not bright at all and it’s kind of reddish. Once again, we turn to globular clusters for insight into the matter. This galaxy is one of six observed by Hubble for proposal 10550. You can see at that link that there are a couple of papers on the matter if you want to know more about how the role that globular clusters play in understanding things. I haven’t read them yet so I’m afraid I can’t offer more details. Sometimes there aren’t enough hours in a day…

The chip gap was here to steal our joy once again, but I did my best to make it not obvious. The part of the galaxy which is blurry represents the lack of data down this thin, vertical strip. Yeah, I could clone data all over the whole thing and make it go away completely, but I like to make it slightly apparent so that everyone has a good idea where the data stops.

I was a little confused about the color balance on this one. I assume that the galaxy probably should appear more or less neutral in color but I have already cranked up the blue quite a bit and it’s still a tad orange. Could be the filters and exposure times at work. The only other thing I can think of is that sometimes dust from our galaxy reddens things considerably.

Red: HST_10550_02_ACS_WFC_F775W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_10550_02_ACS_WFC_F475W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 7.2° 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.