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Thursday, June 10, 2010

NGC 3603 in 1997 and 2007


The massive compact star cluster in NGC 3603 is shown in this image, which blinks between two images taken ten years apart. The images are a color composite of observations in the WFPC2 filters F547M (1997) respectively F555W (2007) (blue), F675W (green) and F814W (red). The field of view is about 20 arcseconds across. The boxes show a zoomed view of three foreground stars with a particularly high apparent speed relative to the cluster members. Other fast-moving stars can be spotted by closer examination of the two pictures. Most of the cluster stars move by less than 1/10 of a pixel over the ten-year period, which is not discernible by eye.

Copyright: NASA, ESA and Wolfgang Brandner (MPIA), Boyke Rochau (MPIA) and Andrea Stolte (University of Cologne)

Note: If the image above doesn't blink for you, click here.

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