A beautiful portrait of dust-laden, barred spiral galaxy NGC 1559 by Hubble.

I was browsing the archive and decided to do something I normally don't do: look at the most recent available imagery instead of the oldest and forward. Immediately, I was surprised to see some new observations from this month and last of this bright spiral that were under no proprietary period. I thought almost everything went under the year-long proprietary period except for Director's Discretionary programs, but it's not something I have spent a lot of time sorting out.

This dataset contains some ideal wavelengths to work with for people interested in the nearly "natural" experience of human vision. Of course, no galaxy would ever look like this to human eyes, but most of the colors here are visible to human eyes. As a matter of personal preference, I also chose to add the near-infrared and near-ultraviolet filters because it separates the colors a bit more, and the infrared one also reveals more of those distant, faint background galaxies while giving the dust a slightly red hue.

Data from the following proposals were used to create this image: The Hubble Constant to 1%: Physics beyond LambdaCDM

Verifying the progenitor identification of the type II-P supernova 2009ib

A tiny hole was also filled with data from Proposal 9042.

Red: WFC3/UVIS F814W + WFC3/UVIS F606W Green: WFC3/UVIS F555W Blue: WFC3/UVIS F438W + WFC3/UVIS F336W