An Atlas of Hubble Space Telescope Ultraviolet Images of Nearby Galaxies

Abstract

We present an atlas of UV ($\sim 2300$ Ã ) images, obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Faint Object Camera, of the central $22''\times 22''$ of 110 galaxies. The observed galaxies are an unbiased selection constituting about one half of a complete sample of all large ($D>6'$) and nearby ($V< 2000$ km s$^{-1}$) galaxies. This is the first extensive UV imaging survey of normal galaxies. The data are useful for studying star formation, low-level nuclear activity, and UV emission by evolved stellar populations in galaxies. At the HST resolution ($\sim 0.05''$), the images display an assortment of morphologies and UV brightnesses. These include bright nuclear point sources, compact young star clusters scattered in the field or arranged in circumnuclear rings, centrally-peaked diffuse light distributions, and galaxies with weak or undetected UV emission. We measure the integrated $\sim 2300$ Ã flux in each image, classify the UV morphology, and examine trends between these parameters and the optical properties of the galaxies.

Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. LaTex, 15 pages including 3 postscript figures. AAStex macros included. 19 pages of greyscale figures in gzip-compressed PostScript (about 150kb each) are available at ftp://wise3.tau.ac.il/pub/dani/atlas/ (get plate*.ps.gz)