Heritage
Spotlight: Previous Heritage Team Member
Jayanne
English
The Hubble Heritage team wanted
to expose the public to all sorts of astronomical
creatures in the cosmos, not just planetary nebulae
and galaxies. So each team member spent some time
thinking about what kinds of other things would
be fun to image. Although I study strange, interacting
galaxies, I voiced my support for imaging compact
H III regions in the Magellanic Clouds. H II regions
are large clouds of gas heated by young stars until
they glow like neon lights; an example in our Galaxy
is the Orion Nebula. And the Small and Large Magellanic
Clouds (SMC and LMC) are small galaxies that are
so nearby that they are interacting with our own
Milky Way.
When I was an undergraduate I had
done a summer research project which involved making
a slew of images of pretty H II regions in the SMC
and I even have a picture of one (DEM S 148/149)
in a locket given to me by my project supervisor.
Yet an HST image that captured both the whole shape
and the delicate detail of an H II nebula was missing
from our collection of Heritage goodies. And I calculated
that the H II regions in the Magellanic Clouds would
fit nicely within the field of view the WFPC2 and
were not so distant from us that their texture and
wispy features would be a blur.
Talking about blurry vision, after
rhapsodizing to the Heritage team the merits of
imaging these H II regions, the picture of what
happened next gets fuzzy. Of course I was in contact
with my colleagues who study these objects -- chatting
to them at conferences, and even within the halls
of the Space Telescope Science Institute itself,
about the relevance of the energy output from these
H II regions to my research on the formation of
structure in galaxies. Also one of my jobs as Hubble
Heritage Team coordinator was to liase with scientists
so that there could be a flow of information between
research astronomers and the Heritage team and hence
the public. So I think You-Hua Chu and Sally Oey
were both aware that I wanted to do LMC/SMC H II
regions as a Heritage project. Sally had studied
DEM L 106 some years previously as part of her Ph.D.
thesis, and You-Hua is an absolute guru on LMC superbubbles.
Two perfect people with whom to liase! The next
thing I remember was Sally, who had an office down
the hall from me, saying "Come see what is
on my monitor. It is data that You-Hua collected".
I thought that the single-filter image that she
was showing me was perfect as an example of a compact
H II region. However, to make a colour
image we need images taken through several
different filters. So I advocated to the Heritage
team that we either supplement the existing data
with more exposures or do a similar object.
My notes for the weekly Heritage
meetings show that we settled on DEM L106 as the
H II region of choice and eventually Sally was asked
to make the calculations necessary for pointing
the telescope and scheduling the observations. Unfortunately
Sally and the team did not get much help from me
after this stage of the project. I had left the
Heritage team before the data were collected, to
become an assistant professor in Physics and Astronomy
at the University of Manitoba, and regretfully did
not get to participate in the production of this
image. But this image release has reminded me to
put on my thinking cap and see if there are any
more fanciful creatures of the cosmos that I should
cheerily promote to the Hubble Heritage team as
fodder for their imagemaking craftshop.
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