Hubble Space Telescope Highlights for July and August 2014 | |
wishiwas User ID: 25147991 United States 09/26/2014 09:13 AM Report Abusive Post Report Copyright Violation | Hey Astro, why do the first few pictures have a red line going straight through the middle of that galaxy? Its like there's a comet rushing through, cutting the galaxy in half. Thanks! Quoting: wishiwas The WFC3 visible light camera is actually two physically separate CCDs put right next to each other. There's actually a small gap between them in the images by default, for the sake of making an intact-looking image I closed that gap as much as possible, but there's still going to be either a seam in the images or you'll see that they're slightly disjointed since there's physically a small gap between the pixels on one CCD and the pixels on the other. Leaving a small seam is actually less visually distracting. [link to documents.stsci.edu] On some images they'll actually take an additional image with the pointing offset from the rest of the exposures just enough to cover up the gap with image data. The NGC 6744 image is an example of this. They don't always do that though, these images were all taken for scientific reasons, not to make aesthetically pleasing images. I'm just taking raw scientific data as they release it and doing my best to turn them into aesthetically pleasing images. Thank you for the reply! I figured it was something like that, but wanted to check. The universe is such a beautiful place. Thanks for showing it to us! Justitiae soro Fides |