Re: Image questions
Hello Richard. Whilst I don't think anything nefarious is going on here there certainly appear to be some anomalies between the two sets of pictures that go beyond your explanation.
The difference between the UV left and right images isn't due to magnification differences but is down to post-processing; the left image has been post-processed to consolidate the features and remove the noise whereas the right image hasn't. It's easy to identify ten clear features in the left image (counting the elongated feature below the bright top-left feature as a single feature, even though it's almost certainly two closely aligned sub-features) and these ten features can, with a little effort and careful scrutinisation, be identified and mapped onto the right image. These two images are at the same scale and show the same region of space. As to why the right image hasn't been post-processed in the same way as the left image; due to the magnitude of the flare feature, I suspect that the same level of post-processing would result in the new flare feature merging with the two pre-existing features closest to it (above and to its upper right). This is ok though because, as I say, it's possible to map these two images on to each other anyway.
The major issue between the upper and lower sets of images is because it's not possible to map the upper set of images on to the lower set of images.
For example: in both of the visual images, the flaring galaxy is located a little to the right of a line between the two bright white galaxies but in the UV images it is clearly a little to the left of the same line between the same two corresponding features (and the relative angular distances between the flaring galaxy and these two features is different). Another clear anomaly is that the elongated feature (referred to earlier) in the UV images 'points' nearly exactly towards the flare feature (slightly below it, in fact) but there's no comparable feature in the visual images.
In fact, it's the number of features that only appear in the UV images, that are missing from the visual+IR images, that most bothers me. Whilst many astronomical objects may be invisible in UV but visible in other frequencies (which is supposed to be the main point of the two sets of images), the opposite isn't true; there are relatively few types of object that are _only_ visible in UV (mostly some types of AGN and their associated relativistic jets), yet these UV images appear to show many of them in a relatively small region of space.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
