How to Find HST Images: A Step-by-Step Tutorial

[turbo]

Can anyone tell me how to locate HST images? There is a picture of NGC7603 on this web site.

http://quasars.org/ngc7603.htm

I can't seem to locate the picture by searching HST's publicly-available pictures. Punching in the ngc# yeilds NO matches, although it is evident that the image exists somewhere, in MUCH higher resolution than the jpg on the quasars.org site. Can somebody give me a step-by-step tutorial? The image is not available on NED although another less-deep exposure is. Thanks.

 

[chroot]

Is there a reason for you to suspect there actually is a Hubble image of this object? Hubble is not a survey instrument.

- Warren

 

[Nereid]

It's a Seyfert, so you'd guess there's a good chance Hubble got off some snaps (IIRC, the raw HST images of the Seyferts are among the most frequently downloaded of all raw HST images; the HDFs are in far greater demand, but everyone wants the high quality scientific products, not the raw ones, full of cosmic ray hits, uncalibrated, etc, etc).

So, going to MAST, I did all the right things and found this

Wow! The HST image was taken as part of observing program 5479 "Sub-arcsecond structure in nearby AGNs quasars & AGN Seyferts" (Malkan), and the page lists 50 papers which reference this program! :surprise:

MAST is a very powerful search tool (and more), for astronomical images (and spectra, ...) in the public domain; not as powerful as ASTROVIRTEL will be, and it takes some time to learn how to get what you want from it, but IMVHO it's worth the effort.

Do you have image processing software, that handles large FITS files?

 

[turbo]

How to retrieve the image??

Nereid, thank you for your help. I have registered for access to the Hubble archive and get get to the page by searching for MARK530, but when I click on the link that says "FITS preview" I get a file called hst_preview_search with no file extension. I am unsure what to do with this file (I'm running Windows XP with EI, Netscape, and Firefox browsers available). Is there an installation/extension that I am missing? TIA

 

[Nereid]

You should save it, and open it later, using an application which can display FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files; the extension is .fits (or .fit?). The link here has lots of stuff on FITS, including (I think) a link to a free (shareware?) Windows FITS viewer app.

 

[Nommos Prime (Dogon)]

On-Line Hubble Images

Here;
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
http://www.stsci.edu/hst/
http://hubble.nasa.gov/