Arp 4 - a photo on Flickriver

Arp 4

Two spiral galaxies that appear to be next to each other. However, the left spiral is much more distant, and the right spiral is much closer. It is likely that the smaller spiral is actually the larger one. Even though the right galaxy is fairly dim, it looks very pretty because of a proliferation of star formation. If you could make an animation of millions of years into a few seconds, it would not only swirl around, it glitter and sparkle with supernovas. I've always imagined these scenes would be profoundly beautiful with a god's-eye-view.

Recently saw some people on bsky and mastodon sending out the bat signal that this could look good with some extra processing. Combination of Hubble and Pan-STARRS data. Hubble image is a single snapshot from Julianne Dalcanton's prolific proposal 15446.

Colors are fairly rough coming not only from lower resolution ground-based Pan-STARRS exposures, but also there are always a lot of subtle artifacts that get amplified when trying to squeeze more saturation out of them. I did change the specific range of cyan colors to pink, which is possibly a questionable decision. The reasoning here is that h-alpha is strongly represented in the Pan-STARRS r filter, but I had to use it in the green channel, which resulted in clouds of cyan around star-forming regions. It's clearly defined enough by that specific cyan color that I can do a hue shift to magenta and it looks pretty accurate to me.

Corners where HST data are missing contain only Pan-STARRS data, so they look much blurrier/lower resolution. I've been trying to keep north up more so it's an ok compromise to accomplish this.

Luminosity: ACS/WFC F606W
Red: Pan-STARRS i
Green: Pan-STARRS r
Blue: Pan-STARRS g

North is up.

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Taken on: January 16, 2025

Tags:

15446

galaxy

hst

Prop15446

spiral

Pan-STARRS « less

Sets appears in: • all astronomy • Galaxies of Prop 15446 more » • Hubble Processing • Spirals in Galaxies « less

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