30DOR.GIF contains the 30 Doradus in GIF format.
Contents of the image:
The 30 Doradus image was take on August 25, 1990 with the Planetary Camera of the Hubble Space Telescope. The center wavelength of the filter used is about 368 nm (near ultraviolet). The pixels in the image are 0.043 arcseconds square and the image covers an area on the sky 11 arcseconds square. North is to the upper right and East is to the upper left. The image has been processed with a technique known as Lucy deconvolution to minimize the effects of the spherical aberration of the telescope.
When displayed with the gray scale included in the GIF format image, only the brightest stars are visible. To see the faint stars you will need to change the gray scale to saturate at much smaller values of intensity. For example, a gray scale in which intensity level 0 is shown as black, 1 as dark gray, 2 as light gray, and 3 and above as white will reveal most of the stars contained in the image.
The image resolves many more stars than could be resolved from the ground and, along with images in other colors, is allowing astronomers to study the process of star formation in this spectacular supergiant HII region.
Edward J. Groth for the WFPC team, October 19, 1990.