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I'm working on a little side project that traces and identifies galaxies in Hubble's XDF using OpenCV.

This is my current progress with tracing the more prominent galaxies: enter image description here enter image description here

I was wondering if there was some kind of database for the galaxies that appear in the XDF. Like their scientific names, coordinates, distances, and etc.

Here's a link to the image I am using for the project: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/xdf.html

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The XDF data release has images in FITS format, which includes a world coordinate system to map image coordinates to celestial coordinates. Then you can query SIMBAD to see what galaxies are near those coordinates.

For example, I loaded a WFC 60mas/pixel image into a FITS viewer, which indicates that the face-on spiral at center left of the PR image is near J2000 3h32m40.8s -27d46m16s. (To align the PR image with the equatorial coordinate grid, rotate it about 50 degrees clockwise.) SIMBAD found this galaxy at that location, B-band magnitude 22.

To do this in Python code, you could try using astropy.wcs to get celestial coordinates from the FITS image and astroquery.simbad to look up objects of interest.

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After speaking to some people on Astronomy discords, they told me about SINBAD.

http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbad/

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