Matthew A. Bershady

The current ability of HST to reveal morphological structure in medium-redshift galaxies

The capabilities of the Faint Object Camera (FOC) and the Wide Field Camera (WFC) are assessed on the basis of a brief program of single-orbit images of medium-faint galaxies. The FOC yielded a good resolved image of a compact galaxy at a blue magnitude J of 20.5 in a single-orbit exposure. WFC images have a survey capability that can include many galaxies per field, with sufficient resolving power to distinguish clearly between galaxies and stars down to the level of 0.2 arcsec, depending on the signal-to-noise ratio, and a reasonable capacity for morphology. Although some morphological detail can be discerned in even the aberrated images, deconvolutions are found to greatly enhance the ability to see structural detail. Even at the low S/N that is provided by single-orbit exposures, the more sophisticated restoration methods offer some advantage over simple Fourier or Lucy techniques.