Ever wondered what the Hubble telescope has been doing these days?

Well one of its tasks after the latest service mission was to make a complete picture of the Andromeda galaxy. The finished a while ago. Now it’s made a complete picture of the Triangulum Galaxy. 665 megapixels from 56 separate images. Released 7 Jan 2019.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2019-01 – links to images and short zoom in video here.
Full res 1.51 GB. Half res. Quarter res. And smaller images on http://hubblesite.org/image/4305/news_release/2019-01

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has produced this stunningly detailed portrait of the Triangulum galaxy (M33), displaying a full spiral face aglow with the light of nearly 25 million individually resolved stars. It is the largest high-resolution mosaic image of Triangulum ever assembled, composed of 54 Hubble fields of view spanning an area more than 19,000 light-years across.

The Local Group of galaxies is dominated by the Milky Way, Andromeda, and Triangulum. As the junior member of this trio of spiral galaxies, Triangulum provides the valuable comparisons and contrasts that only a close companion can. Most notably, Triangulum’s star formation is 10 times more intense than in the comparable Hubble panorama of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Astronomers have only begun to mine the enormous amount of data generated by these new Hubble observations, and expect they will yield important insights into the effects of such vigorous star formation.

The orderly nature of Triangulum’s spiral, with dust distributed throughout, is another distinctive feature. Astronomers think that in the Local Group, Triangulum has been something of an introvert, isolated from frequent interactions with other galaxies while keeping busy producing stars along organized spiral arms. Uncovering the Triangulum galaxy’s story will provide an important point of reference in understanding how galaxies develop over time, and the diverse paths that shape what we see today.

For more on the Andromeda image from 2015, see http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2015-02

But wait, that’s only 250 megapixels. What have I missed?

It’s been looking looking looking

Peak Warming Man said:

It’s been looking looking looking

This driver failed to look properly

Tau.Neutrino said:

Peak Warming Man said:

It’s been looking looking looking

This driver failed to look properly

Opps sorry

I saw this the other day and noted that the galaxy was named for its position in the Triangulum constellation. You know the ancients had run out of ideas when they see three bright stars and decided to call it after a triangle…

furious said:

I saw this the other day and noted that the galaxy was named for its position in the Triangulum constellation. You know the ancients had run out of ideas when they see three bright stars and decided to call it after a triangle…

LOL.

I actually think I know the real reason for the choice of name, but I’d better check to avoid too much egg on face.

For starters, the Triangulum galaxy is nowhere near the centre of the Triangulum constellation. It’s almost as close to Pisces.

Good thing I checked, I was wrong. Triangulum “first catalogued by Ptolemy in the 2nd century. The Greeks called the constellation Deltoton because its shape resembled the Greek letter delta.”

I had thought it might be “one of the constellations created by Nicolas Louis de Lacaille that were named after various astronomical instruments.” but it isn’t.

So you’re absolutely right. :-)

Nice

In other news about what Hubble has been doing:

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2019-02 – the wobbly dust and gas ring of nearby young red dwarf star AU Mic.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-63 – On December 13th, 2018, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed comet 46P/Wirtanen, a periodic comet that orbits the Sun once every 5.4 years.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-56 – intracluster light aligns with dark matter (the opposite of what was found for the Bullet Cluster).

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-52 – Hubble Finds a Fast Evaporating Exoplanet

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-48 – 4 Dec 2018, Portrait of Spiral Galaxy M100

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-44 – 29 Nov 2018, Hubble is so powerful it can see globular star clusters 300 million light-years away. And, a lot of them. Peering into the heart of the giant Coma cluster of galaxies Hubble captured a whopping 22,426 globular star clusters.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-47 – 11 Nov 2018, Progenitor for supernova SN 2017ein, near the center of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 3938, located roughly 65 million light-years away. It is blue and extremely hot, possibly 45 to 55 times more massive than our Sun.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-28 – 7 Nov 2018, Largest infrared survey of nearby galaxies’ cores.

http://hubblesite.org/news_release/news/2018-40 – 31 Oct 2018, a young star’s planet-forming disk is casting a giant shadow.