Galaxy on Fire (2014)

The Whirlpool (M51) with a strong bias toward presenting the structures present in the H-alpha data. This was inspired by my recent interpretation of NGC 4449 in which I used a similar process.

These data were acquired in 2005 (Proposal 10452) for Hubble’s 15th anniversary. You can read more about it and see the Heritage version of the image, which is absolutely beautifully processed, here.

Red: hlsp_heritage_hst_acs-wfc_m51_f658n_v1_drz_sci
Green: hlsp_heritage_hst_acs-wfc_m51_f658n_v1_drz_sci + hlsp_heritage_hst_acs-wfc_m51_f555w_v1_drz_sci
Blue: hlsp_heritage_hst_acs-wfc_m51_f435w_v1_drz_sci

North is NOT up. It is 90° 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.