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Galaxies are huge collections of stars, gas and dust held together by gravity. Our Galaxy, the Milky Way, is known as a spiral galaxy as it has spiral arms that wind their way around the center of the galaxy (or bulge). The first galaxies were identified as far back as the 17th Century by Charles Messier. Messier compiled a list of 110 star clusters and spiral nebulae which he discovered while searching the sky for comets. It wasn't until the early 20th century however that these nebulae were in fact spiral galaxies.
In the 1920's Edwin Hubble realized there were different types of galaxies and began to classifying them according to their appearance, this is the famous ʻtuning fork diagram'.
Use the list of galaxies below and search the data archive for the B, V and R fits files for each galaxy. Once you have downloaded these files, you can go ahead and make color images and start to classify your galaxies. Finally, you can add them to the Tuning Fork template to recreate the famous Hubble image.
HTF_template.jpg
