Resources for Finding FITS Images
in Multiple Wavelengths
An image of two tangled galaxies released by NASA's Great Observatories. The Antennae galaxies, located about 62 million light-years from
Earth, are shown in this composite image. X-rays are shown in blue (from the Chandra X-ray Observatory), visible light is shown in gold and
brown (from the Hubble Space Telescope), and infrared light is shown in red (from the Spitzer Space Telescope). The Antennae galaxies take
their name from the long antenna-like arms seen in wide-angle views of the system. These features were produced in the collision. Image credit:
Chandra: NASA/CXC/SAO, Spitzer: NASA/JPL-Caltech, Hubble: NASA/STScI
This guide is intended as a resource for educators looking for FITS images of astronomical objects taken
in many different wavelengths across the electromagnetic spectrum. The idea is provide links to
webpages containing images of astronomical objects gathered from a variety of NASA missions. This list
is by no means exhaustive. And many resources like this already exist for professional astronomers,
however they are often quite technical and difficult for non-experts to understand and navigate. Plus
the images they provide are not typically suitable for classroom-level activities. The intended audience
here is grade 6-12 educators and students, so there is a greater focus on providing webpages that are
easy to navigate and understand, or those that contain helpful instructions written for educators. In
general the purposes is to help educators find multiwavelength images that are suitable for making 3color “pretty pictures”.
There are three levels of online resources linked to here: Simple, Medium, and Complex
 ‘Simple’ resources contain links to FITS images that are well-labeled and easy-to-understand.
They are often created specifically with educators in mind. However, they typically don’t offer
very many options for those hoping to see a lot of different astronomical objects.
 ‘Medium’ resources contain links to images that take a little more work to understand and/or
process. There are also links to sites with instructions for how to get FITS images from a large
database. These are better for those looking for specific astronomical objects.
 ‘Complex’ resources are the ones that have been developed for the professional astronomical
community. They are difficult to navigate and understand, but provide the most options and
flexibility for someone looking for very specific objects and wavelengths.
Most educators will want to use the simple and medium resources.
Simple
X-ray
From the Chandra X-ray Observatory
http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/openFITS/
Includes 6 objects in multiple wavelengths
Visible (plus some UV and some near IR)
From the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/datasets_archives/
Includes 17 different objects in multiple wavelengths (a few are from the Digital Sky
Survey)
The page also includes info on how to access Hubble images directly from the archive
(very technical process)… as well as a link to where to get data from the European
Southern Observatory’s Digitized Sky Survey
Medium
Ultraviolet
From the Hubble Space Telescope (HST)
http://archive.stsci.edu/prepds/maoz/datalist.html
Has about 100 images of nearby galaxies in ultraviolet (one image/wavelength per
galaxy) categorized by their NGC number.
Infrared
From the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE)
http://wise.ssl.berkeley.edu/index.html
This webpage contains instructions for how to download images directly from the WISE
archive. At the moment you can get images of almost every object in 57% of the sky. In
Spring 2012 all images from the full sky will be available.
All wavelengths
Skyview
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/easy.html
The Skyview interface can find images in all wavelengths. It was developed for
astronomers, but this connects to a page with instructions for non-astronomers. It also
provides recommendations for what options to select in each wavelength range.
Complex
All wavelengths
Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) Datascope;
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/vo/datascope/init.pl
Use DataScope to find everything that's known about a given target or region of the sky.
DataScope will query hundreds of VO-enabled data resources and organize the results
for your viewing.
Ultraviolet, Visible, Near IR, and Radio
Multimission Archive at STScI (MAST)
http://archive.stsci.edu/index.html
A NASA funded project to support and provide to the astronomical community a variety
of astronomical data archives, with the primary focus on scientifically related data sets
in the optical, ultraviolet, and near-infrared parts of the spectrum.
All wavelengths
Astronomical Images Over the Web
http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/astro.image.html
An extensive website that lists most of the available online resources for finding
astronomical images.