Such artifacts can be removed by means of advanced computerized image processing, but always at the loss of some scientific information. After each single exposure, the telescope was offset by a small angle in order to cover also the gaps between the eight CCD's in the mosaic and to enable removal of minor cosmetical blemishes of the detectors. Since the CCD mosaic of the WFI comprises 67 million pixels, a total of 1,900 million data points was thus used to construct this image. The related image processing, using the EIS WFI data reduction pipeline , recently developed at ESO, kept a powerful workstation fully busy for about 8 hours. Many background galaxies are also seen.
North is up and East is left.
The interstellar dust and high density of stars in our home galaxy severely obscure the view towards more distant objects. Modern electronic detectors are able to register much fainter objects than those seen on the photographic plates. In the present field, cf. This illustrates well the recent instrumental progress for this type of observations. Note the strong warping of the galaxy to the left of the center, which may be caused by gravitational interaction with one or both of the bright galaxies that are seen above and below it.