A Sea of Spiral Galaxies

This is a Hubble Space Telescope view of a small, random location on the sky, awash largely with spiral galaxies like our Milky Way. This sea of galaxies stretches across billions of light-years. Most of the prominent galaxies look different only because they are tilted at various orientations to Earth, from edge-on to face-on. A few others are involved in mergers. The objects with diffraction spikes are foreground stars in our own galaxy. The image was taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) at the same time a much closer pair of spiral galaxies, NGC 4302 and NGC 4298, was being simultaneously photographed by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). These so-called "parallel field" observations increase the efficiency of how the telescope is used when making observations.

About the colours

This image is a composite of separate exposures made by the ACS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope using the F606W (V) filter to isolating the light in broad wavelength range to produce a monochromatic image.

About the data

These datasets are from the HST proposal 14913 , M. Mutchler, J. Green, Z. Levay, D. Smith, and R. Villard (STScI), and image processing by J. DePasquale (STScI).