Press Release
Star Clouds in the Andromeda Galaxy
January 28, 1999
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Object Name: Part of Andromeda Galaxy (M31) Telescope: Subaru Telescope / Cassegrain Focus Instrument: Suprime-Cam Filter: R (red) Color: Grayscale Date: UT 1999 Jan 13 Exposure: 900 sec Field of View: 3 acmin by 4 arcmin Orientation: North is upper-right, east is upper-left Position: RA(J2000.0)=0h40m33.51s, DEC(J2000.0)=+40d44m45s |
Explanation:
The Andromeda galaxy (Messier 31) is an assembly of some
100 billions of stars and is a spiral galaxy similar to
our own Galaxy. It is located 2.5 million light years away,
and is one of our nearest neighbors. This image, taken with
a red filter, shows just a tiny part (corresponding to the
white rectangle in the attached sheet) of the Andromeda
galaxy, whose total apparent size is about 3 degrees. The
image shows many points of light which are individual stars
in the Andromeda galaxy, and appears very like our own Milky
Way galaxy when observed with a small telescope. It is difficult
to resolve each of these stars from the ground, but the
high angular resolution and sensitivity of the Subaru Telescope
enables us to resolve these stars with one short exposure.
The bright region from the lower-left to upper-right is
part of the spiral structure, wheremany young stars are
shining brightly.
This image was taken with a large optical camera called Suprime-Cam, which is equipped with six 2048x4096 CCDs specially tuned for astronomical observations. Vertical and horizontal black stripes are gaps between the CCD chips and faulty pixels. Many such exposures, taken with the telescope pointing slightly changed, can be combined to remove these features and produce beautiful images.