Sunday, April 5, 2009

The Winner of the You Point Hubble Voting...

You might recall that I blogged about the opportunity for the public to vote on which object to image with Hubble. The winner (which was my vote) was Arp 274, a trio of galaxies. The winning image was released for 10o Hours of Astronomy and it is a beauty (click to embiggen). For a real bandwidth clogging treat, download the full hi-res image.


These galaxies were thought to be interacting with each other, but the high res view from Hubble shows very little distortion typically associated with interacting galaxies. The blue knots on the outside galaxies indicate a lot of star formation going on. The yellow near the centers of the galaxies indicate older star populations. You can see two bright stars (with diffraction spikes) that are in our galaxy.

In picking the Arp 274, we choose wisely!

Reprinted with permission from the Half-Astrophysicist Blog.

5 comments:

kkdither said...

Yep, my pick too. How cool to see them so close together...and soon, so close up!

Beejay said...

I was wondering when you would post this...I rec'd it in an e-mail from some astronomy group last week...cool.

Beejay said...

Hale, I keep wondering how I got it from some astronomy group...we all know that I can barely find the Big Dipper!!!!!

kkdither said...

beejay, I got it too. When you voted, you gave them an email address.

hale-bopp said...

I didn't get it...I voted...what's up with that?