NGC 1569: Realm of Starburst (2015)

Here’s something done a little differently. The datasets for this brilliant little galaxy are somewhat awkward to compose an image with. There’s near-infrared, red, some H-alpha, and some old WFPC2 green, H-beta and [OIII] available. Long story short, if you try to put them together it almost doesn’t matter what way you do it—funky colors ensue. There’s not enough blue to balance out the image even if you stack all the old WFPC2 imagery together, which I did. In the end, I made those lovely clouds H-alpha purple. I think it looks pretty good. It’s not typical at all, but sometimes you just have to throw out conventions to solve a puzzle. Once I decided to ditch red as an option for the H-alpha, everything fell together quite nicely.

If you prefer a more “natural” treatment of the colors, check out the HubbleSite press release image. Maybe you’ll notice the interesting greenish halo around it. That’s what I mean by the filters being hard to work with.

Previously I posted a close-up image of the three superclusters in this galaxy. You can sort of see them in this picture but they’re all blown out from being overexposed at observation so if you want to see the clusters better, head over to the supercluster image for a more detailed look.

Red: HST_10885_01_ACS_WFC_F814W_sci
Green: HST_10885_02_ACS_WFC_F606W_sci
Blue: hst_08133_01_wfpc2_f547m_wf_sci + hst_08133_01_wfpc2_f502n_wf_sci + hst_08133_01_wfpc2_f487n_wf_sci
Violet: HST_10885_06_ACS_WFC_F658N_sci1

North is NOT up. It is 23.3° 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.