#BARRED SPIRAL GALAXY PICS SOFTWARE#
#BARRED SPIRAL GALAXY PICS FREE#

They have three distinct configurations: they can be elliptical, spiral, and irregular.

#BARRED SPIRAL GALAXY PICS FREE#

'While I'm not an amateur, I just had a lot of passion and free time to do this since I'm on summer break from grad school.Our universe is a place that is both terrifying as it is wonderful, and fascinating as it is strange.Īstronomers estimate that there are between 100,000 and 200,000 million galaxies in the universe that we can observe. 'I'd say that most people that process these images are amateurs unless the images are released by NASA themselves or another research team,' says u/SpaceGuy44. The file conversion software, including Fits Liberator and SAO DS9, is accessible to the public, and there are tutorials online (including several hosted by STScI). 'You do need some skill with photo editors,' says u/SpaceGuy44, 'but I just started with GIMP a month ago and I think I've gotten pretty good with it.' From there, it's a matter of selecting red, green, and blue filters and aligning the image.

#BARRED SPIRAL GALAXY PICS SOFTWARE#

In other words, although anyone can download a FITS file from the Webb archive, you need specialized software to convert the file to a format that image editing software like Photoshop or GIMP can handle. FITS is much more than just another image format (such as JPG or GIF) and is primarily designed to store scientific data sets consisting of multidimensional arrays (images) and 2-dimensional tables organized into rows and columns of information.'

Unlike the striking full-color images Webb's official processing team has released to the public over the last few weeks, the releases u/SpaceGuy44 is talking about are in a data format called FITS (Flexible Image Transport System).Īccording to NASA, 'FITS is the data format most widely used within astronomy for transporting, analyzing, and archiving scientific data files. “I do think I could've done a better job with making the galaxy pop if I weren't rushing to post it before others,” says u/SpaceGuy44, but we’re pretty impressed. About two-thirds of all spiral galaxies have bars, but NGC 1365 is a rarer specimen: it has two bars, with one inside the other: an outer bar spanning the galaxy horizontally, and an inner bar running from the 10 o'clock to 4 o'clock positions. In most barred spiral galaxies - including, most likely, our own Milky Way - a bar-shaped structure made out of older, less metallic stars stretches across the center of the spiral. NGC 1365 is a perfect candidate, because it's a star-forming galaxy with an actively feeding supermassive black hole at its center, and it happens to be 'face-on' toward Earth, so astronomers can see its elaborate double-barred spiral structure in all its glory.

The Great Barred Spiral Galaxy, formally known as NGC 1365, is 56 million light years away, and it's one of a sample of galaxies that astronomers chose for some of Webb's earliest observations, with the goal of learning more about star formation in the near reaches of the universe. 'I chose NGC 1365 since that was the most recent interesting target that the Space Telescope Science Institute, or STScI (the organization that runs JWST) released public images of,' Redditor u/SpaceGuy44, an astronomy graduate student at a university in California, tells Inverse. Raw data from the James Webb Space Telescope has yielded a stunning image of a nearby galaxy, with a little help from an unofficial photo processor.

Barred spiral galaxy pics