We live in one of these021 Archives you know.
Our own Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, much like the one featured in this newly shared image captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3. What you're seeing is NGC 691, a spiral galaxy that's roughly 120 million light-years away.
This image features the spiral galaxy NGC 691, imaged in fantastic detail by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). This galaxy is the eponymous member of the NGC 691 galaxy group, a group of gravitationally bound galaxies that lie about 120 million light-years from Earth. Objects such as NGC 691 are observed by Hubble using a range of filters. Each filter only allows certain wavelengths of light to reach Hubble’s WFC3. The images collected using different filters are then coloured by specialised visual artists who can make informed choices about which colour best corresponds to which filter. By combining the coloured images from individual filters, a full-colour image of the astronomical object can be recreated. In this way, we can get remarkably good insight into the nature and appearance of these objects. Links Video of the Eponymous NGC 691 Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, A. Riess et al.Acknowledgement: M. Zamani This beautiful image is more than just a snapshot, though. Hubble doesn't operate all on its own. An image like this pulls together the details the space telescope is able to discern across multiple wavelengths. Those filtered images are then collected and handed off to a scientifically minded art team that decides which colors best represent each filter.
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The resulting image we see above, then, is a composite. A layered assemblage of colored and filtered looks at NGC 691, overlaid all together to show us the dazzling spectacle of the galaxy's full appearance, as our science understands it.
