*  In its 19 years of viewing the heavens, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made more than 880,000 observations and snapped over 570,000 images of 29,000 celestial objects.

    * Hubble does not travel to stars, planets, and galaxies. It takes pictures of them as it whirls around Earth at 17,500 miles an hour.

    * In its 19-year lifetime, the telescope has made more than 100,000 trips around our planet. With those trips, Hubble has racked up plenty of frequent-flier miles, about 2.8 billion, the planet Neptune's average distance from the Sun.

    * The 19 years' worth of observations has produced nearly 39 terabytes of data, enough to fill almost two collections in the U.S. Library of Congress.

    * Each month the orbiting observatory generates more than 80 gigabytes of data.

    * The Hubble archive sends about 2 terabytes of data each month to astronomers throughout the world.

    * Astronomers using Hubble data have published more than 7,500 scientific papers, making it one of the most productive scientific instruments ever built. In 2008 scientists published nearly 700 journal articles on Hubble telescope data.


Now with regards to the upload...

To commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope's 19 years of historic, trailblazing science, the orbiting telescope has photographed a peculiar system of galaxies known as Arp 194. This interacting group contains several galaxies, along with a "cosmic fountain" of stars, gas, and dust that stretches over 100,000 light-years.

The northern (upper) component of Arp 194 appears as a haphazard collection of dusty spiral arms, bright blue star-forming regions, and at least two galaxy nuclei that appear to be connected and in the early stages of merging. A third, relatively normal, spiral galaxy appears off to the right. The southern (lower) component of the galaxy group contains a single large spiral galaxy with its own blue star-forming regions.

However, the most striking feature of this galaxy troupe is the impressive blue stream of material extending from the northern component. This "fountain" contains complexes of super star clusters, each one of which may contain dozens of individual young star clusters. The blue color is produced by the hot, massive stars which dominate the light in each cluster. Overall, the "fountain" contains many millions of stars.

These young star clusters probably formed as a result of the interactions between the galaxies in the northern component of Arp 194. The compression of gas involved in galaxy interactions can enhance the star-formation rate and give rise to brilliant bursts of star formation in merging systems.

Hubble's resolution shows clearly that the stream of material lies in front of the southern component of Arp 194, as evidenced by the dust that is silhouetted around the star-cluster complexes. It is therefore not entirely clear whether the southern component actually interacts with the northern pair.

The details of the interactions among the multiple galaxies that make up Arp 194 are complex. The shapes of all the galaxies involved appear to have been distorted, possibly by their gravitational interactions with one another.

Arp 194, located in the constellation Cepheus, resides approximately 600 million light-years away from Earth. It contains some of the many interacting and merging galaxies known in our relatively nearby universe. These observations were taken in January of 2009 with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2. Images taken through blue, green, and red filters were combined to form this picturesque image of galaxy interaction.

For additional information, contact:

Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
[email protected]

Keith Noll
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-1828
[email protected]

About the Object  	
Object Name: 	        Arp 194
Object Description: 	Interacting galaxy system
Position (J2000): 	R.A. 11h 57m 55s.30
                        Dec. +36° 23' 20".00
Constellation: 	        Ursa Major
Distance: 	        600 million light-years or 184 megaparsecs
Dimensions: 	        This image is 76 arcseconds (220,000 light-years or 68,000 ________________________parsecs) wide.

About the Data 	
Data Description: 	The Hubble images were created from HST data from proposal ________________________11956: K. Noll, Z. Levay, M. Mutchler, L. Frattare, M. ________________________Livio, W. Januszewski, C. Christian, F. Hamilton, and H. ________________________Bond (Hubble Heritage Team/STScI).

Instrument: 	        WFPC2
Exposure Date(s): 	January 14-19, 2009
Exposure Time: 	        4.7 hours
Filters: 	        F450W (B), F606W (R), and F814W (I)

About the Release 	
Credit: 	        NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
Release Date: 	        April 21, 2009
Color: 
The image is a composite of separate exposures made by the WFPC2 instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. Three filters were used to sample broad wavelength ranges. The color results from assigning different hues (colors) to each monochromatic image. In this case, the assigned colors are:

F814W (I) 	red
F606W (V) 	green
F450W (B) 	blue

enjoy. please seed and leave comments :) comments make me want to upload more ^^