This gallery features images that were captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, but processed by our resident astrophotographer. This data can be downloaded by anyone from the Hubble Legacy Archive website and comes in the form of .fits files, one file per filter used during capture.

These raw image files have a surprising amount of artifacts that must be dealt with in the image processing stage if the goal is to end up with a “pretty picture.”

Some of these artifacts include diffraction spikes from stars that are not in frame, pixels that have been overloaded by bright stars, which essentially spill over into adjacent pixels, causing a fully saturated bar of sorts across the star, as well as “cross-talk” between sensors.

Cross-talk occurs when there is a bright star on one side of the image; there will be a “hole” in the image on the opposite side. All of that said, we are talking about a scientific instrument operating within the limitations of reality that is designed first and foremost to take accurate measurements, not pretty pictures.

So far, working with this data has been a welcomed challenge, and it is very interesting to look back through the catalogue of information collected with Hubble over the years. We hope everyone enjoys this content and that it may inspire even one person to look up at night and wonder!