An Atlas of HST Ultraviolet Images of Nearby Galaxies

The accompanying tables and images are part of a pictorial atlas of UV (2300 Å) images, obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope ( HST) Faint Object Camera, of the central 22''× 22'' of 110 galaxies ( Maoz, Filippenko, Ho, Macchetto, Rix, & Schneider 1996) The observed galaxies are an unbiased selection constituting about one half of a complete sample of all large (D>6 arcmin) and nearby (V< 2000 km/s ) galaxies. This is the first extensive UV imaging survey of normal galaxies. The data are useful for studying star formation, low-level nuclear activity, and UV emission by evolved stellar populations in galaxies. At the HST resolution (~ 0.05''), the images display an assortment of morphologies and UV brightnesses. These include bright nuclear point sources, compact young star clusters scattered in the field or arranged in circumnuclear rings, centrally-peaked diffuse light distributions, and galaxies with weak or undetected UV emission. We measure the integrated ~2300 Å flux in each image, and classify the UV morphology. The UV and optical parameters are given in the tables (see explanation).

The jpeg images below are grey-scale representations of the FOC images after standard pipeline reduction. Additional technical information is available on these processings and the general data quality. Each image has a scale of 22''× 22'', and has been rotated so that north is up and east is to the left. Archival exposures are marked with an "a" next to the galaxy NGC number, and in some cases have a different field of view and sensitivity; see the notes accompanying individual objects, for details. The grey scale of each image is chosen to bring out the most interesting details. However, these snapshots cannot convey all of the useful information in many of the images, and the user is advised to refer to the notes, or to retrieve the actual FITS data, if complete details are required. This is true both for bright sources, where a single grey scale cannot show details of different contrast, and for weak sources ("W-type" morphology), where the faint emission is lost in the reproduction.

Available Data

Copyright Statement: The data presented here will be published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplements. and appears with the permission of the American Astronomical Society and the author cited above. Reuse or redistribution of these data is subject to the copyright policies of the American Astronomical Society.