Space Telescope Science Institute astronomers are giving the public chances to decide where to aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Guided by 8,000 Internet voters, Hubble has already been used to take a close-up, multi-color picture of the most popular object from a list of candidates, the extraordinary ``polar-ring'' galaxy NGC 4650A.

The Hubble Heritage Team invited guest astronomers to form the Polar-Ring Science Team. They helped select the edge-on galaxies presented in the voting session, which ended Feb. 14, 1999, and subsequently participated in acquiring the data.

• About the Vote:
  
  

  	NGC 4650A	44%
  	UGC 3697	29%
  	NGC 4565	24%

  
  
• About the Observations:

  • The Program Coordinator for these observations, Mike Asbury, made notes about the challenges of scheduling the Hubble Space Telescope.

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    There are other observing challenges. For example, the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 detector is not square.

  • The black and white exposures are available in the public archive.

• Links to general descriptions and examples of how black and white images are converted into 3 color images.

• How the raw HST exposures of NGC 4560A have been converted into a 3 color image.
  

• Information at our site can be found at the caption and fast facts table page.

• Other observations include those in neutral gas by Arnaboldi and collaborators.

• The Very Large Telescope image is available at Astronomy Picture of the Day.