Arp 273 - Two interacting galaxies - Hubble ST (Rudy Pohl)

Arp 273 - Two interacting galaxies - Hubble ST

Chosen by NASA as the APOD for November 20, 2019... honoured and happy! : -)

Data acquisition: Hubble Legacy Archive, NASA

Data processing: Rudy Pohl

RGB image

Software: Pixinsight 1.8, Photoshop CS5

Note: Hubble is so amazing - the detail at full resolution is stunning!

Arp 273 is a pair of interacting galaxies, lying 300 million light years away in the constellation Andromeda. It was first described in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies, compiled by Halton Arp in 1966. The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, is about five times more massive than the smaller galaxy. Wikipedia

This is the first Hubble image I've processed in a while now. I've been struck be the shear beauty and grace of these two interacting galaxies since I first saw the image last year, so yesterday I decided to do it.

The processing involves taking 3 greyscale images that were shot with different filters by Hubble, stretching them and assigning red, green and blue to them in different channels and then combining them together into a single RGB image. This is followed by standard processing in Photoshop for colour, contrast, sharpness, denoise, etc. I widened the background width and clone-stamped some objects to fill the empty space.

Original
C
D
E
Final
F

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	3066137
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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