Oh my goodness, what a picture of Stephan's Quintet! Amazing! Super-superior! Hubble at its best, and then you've done some top-class processing, Hunter Wilson!
Let's begin with the apparently largest but intrinsically far smallest of the galaxies, the non-member foreground galaxy NGC 7320. You can almost count the stars in it! Wow!!! And I love the blue color of the disk of this galaxy, of course.
And look at the bulge of NGC 7320. The bulge is small, not very bright at all, and barely yellow. The nucleus is very small and not extremely bright. This is typical of small galaxies.
Oh, but look at the other galaxies, the actual members of Stephan's Quintet! Note how they all have very yellow "main bodies" - the color has something to do with redshift, too. Also note how their inner bulges are so bright that they look all white.
Now look at the galaxy on the left, NGC 7319, the one with the relatively smooth and not strongly blue long arms. A lot of dust is passing right in front of the disk and nucleus of NGC 7319 - it reminds me a little of NGC 1316:
Of course, it also reminds me of NGC 4038:
NGC 4038 has dust lanes cutting across its nucleus, just like NGC 7319.
NGC 7319 has relatively smooth and not strongly blue arms, which are undoubtedly made up predominantly of intermediately aged stars. There are, however, some obvious clusters in it. Young stars appear to form in the densest dust lanes. Note the arm at far left - it has many slightly bluish knots of almost identical brightness. What are they? Could they be large numbers of young to intermediate globular clusters?
Now look at the violently interacting pair, NGC 7318 A and NGC 7318 B. I think it is B to the left, and clearly B is the center of all the action here - enormous tendrils of hydrogen gas have been flung out of it and put in a state of violent star formation. You can almost hear the hissing and roaring as all that hydrogen gas is being converted into thousands of O and B stars! NGC 7318 A, on the other hand, the galaxy that B is colliding with, may just be an ordinary elliptical galaxy suffering a titanic cosmic traffic accident!
Finally, look at all those background galaxies. Amazingly fantastic. And the entire picture is incredibly beautiful, too!
Oh my goodness, what a picture of Stephan's Quintet! Amazing! Super-superior! Hubble at its best, and then you've done some top-class processing, Hunter Wilson!
Let's begin with the apparently largest but intrinsically far smallest of the galaxies, the non-member foreground galaxy NGC 7320. You can almost count the stars in it! Wow!!! And I love the blue color of the disk of this galaxy, of course. 8-) And look at the bulge of NGC 7320. The bulge is small, not very bright at all, and barely yellow. The nucleus is very small and not extremely bright. This is typical of small galaxies.
Oh, but look at the other galaxies, the actual members of Stephan's Quintet! Note how they all have very yellow "main bodies" - the color has something to do with redshift, too. Also note how their inner bulges are so bright that they look all white.
Now look at the galaxy on the left, NGC 7319, the one with the relatively smooth and not strongly blue long arms. A lot of dust is passing right in front of the disk and nucleus of NGC 7319 - it reminds me a little of NGC 1316:
[img]http://www.lunarplanner.com/Images/Deep%20Space/NGC1316-Fornax.jpg[/img]
Of course, it also reminds me of NGC 4038:
[img]http://astrocultura.uai.it/strumenti/imghubble/image015.jpg[/img]
NGC 4038 has dust lanes cutting across its nucleus, just like NGC 7319.
NGC 7319 has relatively smooth and not strongly blue arms, which are undoubtedly made up predominantly of intermediately aged stars. There are, however, some obvious clusters in it. Young stars appear to form in the densest dust lanes. Note the arm at far left - it has many slightly bluish knots of almost identical brightness. What are they? Could they be large numbers of young to intermediate globular clusters?
Now look at the violently interacting pair, NGC 7318 A and NGC 7318 B. I think it is B to the left, and clearly B is the center of all the action here - enormous tendrils of hydrogen gas have been flung out of it and put in a state of violent star formation. You can almost hear the hissing and roaring as all that hydrogen gas is being converted into thousands of O and B stars! NGC 7318 A, on the other hand, the galaxy that B is colliding with, may just be an ordinary elliptical galaxy suffering a titanic cosmic traffic accident!
Finally, look at all those background galaxies. Amazingly fantastic. And the entire picture is incredibly beautiful, too! :D :D :D :D :D :D :D