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by eisstrom 2898 days ago
The advantage of MUSE is that you get all color information, i. e. the flux at any wavelength from blue to red. In principle, one can use this together with the sensitivity curve for our eyes to construct a natural image. In this case, I think, they tried to imitate the color scheme from the Hubble image which is more limited.

In short: Not sure how realistic this is, but one could make a realistic image from the new data.

2 comments

So MUSE is hyperspectral? there's a full spectrograph at each pixel?
Exactly! One datacube that comes out from the instrument contains 300 x 300 spectra. This is actually the main capability of the instrument which has 24 individual spectrographs. Here's a nice animation of the path the light takes inside MUSE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fh2Y6Zyhwc&feature=youtu.be...
Awe-inspiring. You can see the individual spectrographs at https://youtu.be/-fh2Y6Zyhwc?t=1089
Could one use that information the other way around to make estimates for expected "missing data" in Hubble images taken in areas where VLT has not looked yet, for example to decide where to look next?

<something something throw machine learning at it cliché>

Not sure if you meant it like this but redshift estimation comes to my mind. The farther away a galaxy is, the redder it becomes. You can measure the distance (redshift) from galaxy spectra (with MUSE for example) but not from directly HST images. This mapping color -> redshift is called photo-z and was tested with MUSE data in an very famous area observed with HST, the Hubble Ultra Deep field. https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.05062