This NASA/ESA Hubble Area Telescope picture includes a glowing cloudscape from one of many Milky Means’s galactic neighbors, a dwarf galaxy known as the Giant Magellanic Cloud. Positioned 160,000 light-years away within the constellations Dorado and Mensa, the Giant Magellanic Cloud is the most important of the Milky Means’s many small satellite tv for pc galaxies.
This view of dusty gasoline clouds within the Giant Magellanic Cloud is feasible because of Hubble’s cameras, such because the Large Discipline Digicam 3 (WFC3) that collected the observations for this picture. WFC3 holds a wide range of filters, and every lets via particular wavelengths, or colours, of sunshine. This picture combines observations made with 5 completely different filters, together with some that seize ultraviolet and infrared gentle that the human eye can not see.
The wispy gasoline clouds on this picture resemble brightly coloured cotton sweet. When viewing such a vividly coloured cosmic scene, it’s pure to wonder if the colours are ‘actual’. In spite of everything, Hubble, with its 7.8-foot-wide (2.4 m) mirror and superior scientific devices, doesn’t bear resemblance to a typical digicam! When image-processing specialists mix uncooked filtered information right into a multi-colored picture like this one, they assign a colour to every filter. Seen-light observations sometimes correspond to the colour that the filter permits via. Shorter wavelengths of sunshine corresponding to ultraviolet are often assigned blue or purple, whereas longer wavelengths like infrared are sometimes pink.
This colour scheme carefully represents actuality whereas including new data from the parts of the electromagnetic spectrum that people can not see. Nonetheless, there are infinite attainable colour mixtures that may be employed to attain an particularly aesthetically pleasing or scientifically insightful picture.
Learn the way Hubble photos are taken and processed.
Textual content credit score: ESA/Hubble
Picture credit score: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray
