Construction of the individual Great Observatories M101 images

These steps combine data from each of NASA's three Great Observatories into a separate colour composite image. At the left are separate images from three different regions of infrared light from the Spitzer Space Telescope (top), three images from different regions of visible light from the Hubble Space Telescope (middle), and three different regions of X-ray light from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (bottom). Each of the three images from each observatory is assigned a colour according to its wavelength (energy). Red for the reddest (lowest energy) light, green for intermediate wavelengths, and blue for the bluest light (highest energy). These three separate colour images can blend together to see the light from a full range of light in each energy region.