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Introduction
These web pages are a series of very deep photographic images, mostly of bright, nearby galaxies. The images have been made over many years, almost all using deep plates taken with the UK Schmidt Telescope (UKST) at Siding Spring, Australia. The main purpose was to exploit novel photographic techniques to enhance and combine faint images to reach remarkably faint levels of extended object detection over wide fields. This is an application where photography still retains some advantages over electronic image detection, but the main advantage of this approach that all the observational data required already exist, in the UKST plate archives at the Wide-Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) at the Institute for Astronomy in Edinburgh. Many of the images were made in Australia by Malin as UKST plates became available. In 1993 Malin spent some months in the plate archive at Edinburgh, working with Brian Hadley in the (then) ROE darkrooms in an attempt to give some substance what had been a process depending largely on chance availability of plates. The images made with Brian Hadley constitue about half of those here. Many of the early, serendipitous images led to interesting discoveries about galaxies and other objects. The later, more thorough compilation reveals some broad themes in the nature of the faint galaxy features that will be explored in forcoming papers. Some of the more spectacular of these images have been published in journals, conference proceedings and elsewhere. The images from all sources have now been 'digitally remastered', a process that allows correction of nonuniformities that could not be attempted purely photographically. It also allows for the images to be digitally 'stretched' to reveal even fainter components of some galaxies. Digital versions of the pictures also allow digital publication, one advantage of which is regular updating. As time permits the following sections will be expanded into what we hope will be a useful resource. Background something on the sky background Photographic Amplification Unsharp Masking Combining multiple images References |