IRAS 16399-0937 (2014)

This galactic collision in progress was part of the same survey which produced a plethora of these peculiarities but I don’t think this one was in the press release or processed by anyone previously.

There is actually a very interesting triple-stream flowing southwest away from the galaxy but I found that forcing it to appear turned the picture unacceptably noisy. A heavily processed version showing the tidal stream can be seen here.

A variety of filters were available to make use of. I ended up using some infrared data from NICMOS (always a challenge) and near-infrared, h-alpha, and blue from WFC/ACS. It’s hacked together but I liked the result.

These data were collected for three different proposals:
Proposal 10592, An ACS Survey of a Complete Sample of Luminous Infrared Galaxies in the Local Universe
Proposal 11325, HST NICMOS Survey of the Nuclear Regions of Luminous Infrared Galaxies in the Local Universe
Proposal 11604, The Nuclear Structure of OH Megamaser Galaxies

Red: NICMOS F160W + WFC/ACS F814W + WFC/ACS FR656N
Green: WFC/ACS F814W + WFC/ACS FR656N
Blue: WFC/ACS F814W + WFC/ACS F435W

North is 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.