Also known as M110, this is a close-up view of Andromeda's famous dwarf elliptical satellite. This patch was imaged several times over in a search for variable stars, RR Lyrae in particular, in order to study the distances to these stars. Looking more at the proposal abstract for these observations, one realizes how slow science can be sometimes. In order to view the proper motions of stars within this galaxy, further observations will have to be taken 8-12 years from now, with perhaps even more in the future. Will Hubble survive that long? Will future telescopes be launched to pick up where Hubble left off? We'll just have to wait and see.

Some processing notes: The chip gap was filled with cloned data to make it unobtrusive. It's not perfectly done, nor was it intended to be a perfect match. You should be able to tell there is a very faintly darker band horizontal across the image about halfway down—where the gap was. Some charge bleeds were also covered with cloned data. Given the nature of studying variable stars, these are some of my favorite data to process because it is very easy to eliminate all of the cosmic rays from the image using a median stack method. So everything you see here is a real star or galaxy, and not an artifact. The noise level is also exceptionally low.

Data from the following ambitious proposal were used to create this image: [Tracing%20the%206-D%20Orbital%20and%20Formation%20History%20of%20the%20Complete%20M31%20Satellite%20System https://archive.stsci.edu/proposal_search.php?mission=hst&id=15902]

Red: ACS/WFC F814W Green: Pseudo Blue: ACS/WFC F606W