First images from our new Hubble Space Telescope snapshot program

Back in the fall there was a special call for proposals for gap-filler snapshot observations for the Hubble Space Telescope. I submitted a proposal, along with Luis Ho and Minjin Kim, to get images of nearby active galaxies from the Swift-BAT AGN sample. Our proposal was approved, and the observations just started in late March. These observations are used to fill in small gaps in the HST observing schedule, and two other gap-filler proposals by other groups were also approved for imaging of different samples of galaxies. Our observations are short F814W (I-band) images from the ACS Wide-Field Camera. Our sample consists of AGNs from the Swift-BAT sample at redshifts below 0.1 that don’t already have HST imaging in I-band filters from previous programs, and there are 542 objects in our sample. Here’s one of our first images, Swift J0100.9-4750 (aka ESO 195-IG021). This cutout just shows a small part of the total ACS/WFC field of view.