Hubble's 27th anniversary

For Hubble's 27th anniversary I designed these observations of a galaxy pair (NGC 4302 and NGC 4298) in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. See the full NASA press release. I combined all the exposures into mosaics for each filter that were then turned into color composite images by other members of our outreach imaging team.

The complete set of observations included an optical mosaic (UVIS, above) and an infrared (IR) mosaic of the galaxy pair, using a total of five filters with Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). You can see the optical and infrared mosaics are not exactly the same size, and that is because each camera has a different field-of-view. A 2x2 optical mosaic and a 3x2 infrared mosaic can cover roughly the same area. But with Hubble, it also possible to turn on a second instrument to get simultaneous observations of an adjacent field. So below the target galaxies you can see a large field where I simply obtained as many deep optical exposures with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS, in just one wide filter F606W) as possible. Since this is a field in the Virgo Cluster, we knew there would be many small distant galaxies detected, and there were. I encourage you to view the full-resolution version of this ACS parallel image to explore the random galaxy "zoo" -- and marvel at just how powerful this 27-year-old telescope can be, even when pointing at "empty space"!

Hubble's 27th anniversary is also my 27th anniversary with Hubble. I was hired just 2 weeks before the launch of Hubble in 1990, and was able to get to the VIP viewing site at Kennedy Space Center (photo below) to watch Hubble and my own career get launched! Back then, I surely could not have imagined all the amazing experiences I would have working on this triumphant science mission, including having the honor of producing many of these iconic images.