In March 2006, the Hubble Heritage Team obtained a large 4-color mosaic image of the M82 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) onboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). See 10776 PI: Matt Mountain) for details.

To the right is the six-pointing ACS mosaic overlay on the DSS image of M82 from the Digitized Sky Survey. The M82 data were obtained in four filters: B, V, I, and H-alpha.

The resulting color composite image was released to the community on April 24, 2006 to celebrate Hubble's 16th anniversary. Since the M82 mosaics produced by the Hubble Heritage Team represent a significant investment of expert processing beyond the standard archival products, these drizzle-combined FITS have now been released as a High-Level Science Product via the Multimission Archive at Space Telescope (MAST).

In 2014, Smith and Strolger reprocessed the F814W pointing covering SN2014J to improve the absolute astrometry. The information was covered in The Astronomer's Telegram #5821.

We provide a means to explore the data via an interactive display.

We provide a list of downloadable FITS files and some associated preview GIF images.

A very complete text-only README file has been provided which describes key aspects of the observing program, the standard pipeline processing, and the post-pipeline combination of these images into complete mosaics. A paper (to be published Jan 2007 in PASP) describes the processing in detail. The paper has been posted to astro_ph http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0612547

Data may be downloaded via your web browser from the list of FITS files mentioned above or via anonymous ftp. FTP to archive.stsci.edu logging on as anonymous then cd /pub/hlsp/m82. The FITS files are contained in the directory "version1". The preview gif files in the directory "previews".