Julia Plummer
PhD Candidate
Astronomy & Education
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I worked with Dr. Mario Mateo at the University of Michigan on a project studying the dwarf galaxies in the M81 group from spring 1998 through summer 1999. We have deep images in B,V and I of thirty-some odd galaxies. Here are a couple of lovely images of a very interesting dwarf elliptical galaxy.
To create a color image from black-and-white CCD images, I used the IRAF package color.rgbsun. In this package, one specifies an blue image, green image and red image as well as the specific range of that these colors cover on the image. By varying the range, the relative intensity of the specific colors is changed. My goal was to produce an image that acurately portrayed the colors that the human eye would see, if it could see that faint. I followed the method of Wainscoat and Kormendy (1997). This is the result:
For those familiar with dwarf ellipticals, they are usually red not green as the above picture appears. So, I'm not really sure what went wrong with my proceedure.
I then, rather unscientifically, adjusted the colors so that the image looked the way I wanted it to. Below is the result.
