Westerlund 1, the Ara Cluster (Brandon Pimenta)

Westerlund 1, the Ara Cluster

Westerlund 1 is a young star cluster in the constellation Ara. It is classified as a 'super star cluster', a very massive and young intermediate between open clusters and globular clusters.

Most of the images you see of this cluster have red cluster stars because interstellar dust absorbs higher energy light like blue but passes through lower energy light like red. This is a near infrared image from the WFC3 camera on the Hubble Space Telescope, which is not affected as much by interstellar absorption.

A quick search interestingly couldn't see any prior processes of this. Here are my processing details:

Red: hst_11708_0?_wfc3_ir_f160w

Green: hst_11708_0?_wfc3_ir_f139m

Blue: hst_11708_0?_wfc3_ir_f125w

They look like ultraviolet, but aren't. This data is from August 25, 2010 and obtained from Hubble Legacy Archive and processed by me. I had to stitch together two images to get the whole thing. One of the images was rotated a hair off and I tried my best to fix it, which is why it looks a tiny bit blurry but that's okay. It was actually quite a pain with GIMP, it took me at least an hour to align everything.

This makes me want to do the Quintuplet for some reason. I may do it in the future if possible.

I don't know if north is up or not. I don't actually want to know either.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic failed
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	844390
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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