Abell 2744 Epoch 2 (2014)

This brilliant dataset I would recommend to anyone interested in processing Hubble data. It has some niggling features to deal with, primarily in the f435w channel, but as far as I can tell there is not a single cosmic ray in the field. It’s astonishing, beautiful, and refreshing to work with—lovingly dithered, drizzled, and corrected by the Frontier Fields team.

Fun tasks: Find the mirror images and find the jellyfish.

Those big elliptical galaxies ought not to be so yellow. I could make them whiter, but I decided to leave them like this for fun. They are so distant that redshift is quite pronounced. This is the wrong set of filters to use if you want to eliminate that redshift, anyway. Luckily, the data from Epoch 1 contain all the infrared necessary for such a task. I’m going to go back and grab that next and work it into this.

Yes, I did this cluster once before, but these are new data and I also feel like I could do better than I did so I am taking this chance to retry. Weird processing note: I ended up putting a pure black layer masked to only cover the darkest, noisiest parts of the image in the “color” layer mode. Haven’t done this before, but I like the result, though it corrupts the noise. Is that such a sin?

These data are all available here in a somewhat daunting list. If you just want the exact datasets I used, see below. Otherwise, you’ll have to take a moment to familiarize yourself with the file naming convention, which is noted on page 10 of the readme pdf and also fyi hffpar = Hubble Frontier Fields Parallel. The parallel fields are another can of worms…

Red: hlsp_frontier_hst_acs-30mas-selfcal_abell2744_f814w_v1.0-epoch2_drz
Green: hlsp_frontier_hst_acs-30mas-selfcal_abell2744_f606w_v1.0-epoch2_drz
Blue: hlsp_frontier_hst_acs-30mas-selfcal_abell2744_f435w_v1.0-epoch2_drz

North is NOT up. It is 37.3° 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.