NGC 339 (2014)

Just a quick globular cluster. This one is in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Some background galaxies are scattered between the stars. The most prominent one is an elliptical galaxy in the upper left but there are a lot of spiral and lenticular disks peeking through as well.

This was part of a study on star clusters in the SMC measuring ages of stars and a bunch of other stuff I will not attempt to paraphrase because I’ll probably get it wrong. See for yourself here*. Thanks, people who did proposal 10396!

Red: HST_10396_04_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Green: Pseudo
Blue: HST_10396_04_ACS_WFC_F555W_sci

North is NOT up. It is 43.8° 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.