Friday, September 15, 2006

S0 What 2.

I've just made up another picture using the brilliant(ly named and in use) Stiff. This one is of another S0 galaxy NGC 4417, sorry about all the S0's I'll make up something more interesting soon I promise.

NGC 4417 is a fairly standard edge on S0 located in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies, I may include it in my proposal but it seems to have a very weak disc so it may not be worth it.


Most of the very small blue dots you can see in the halo (the diffuse light) of the galaxy are probably Globular Clusters, the other main area of my research.

Note: For those who are interested the image was made from data taken by the very good people involved in the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. The picture was created from two images, a F435W exposure and a F850LP exposure, clearly you can't get three colours needed for a picture from two filters, so I made another image (the green one) by averaging the two pictures. This is the reason why the image seems a bit less colourful than other images, but overall I still think its fairly pretty. Check out the thousands of background galaxies around the main galaxy.

The black line across the middle is the gap between the two CCDs in the ACS instrument. The Virgo Cluster Survey didn't dither the images to fill in the gaps, because it would take up too much time.

I have a higher resolution TIFF if anyone is interested. But its a pretty hefty 52Mb.


1 comment:

Rob said...

Mark, you seem to have missed a bit in that picture....