E. HST Images and GAIA Simulated Flux Maps

Since only flux maps of a single galaxy were presented on a small scale in Chapter 7, here a small gallery of GAIA simulated flux maps is presented on a larger scale together with HST original images. The selection of the galaxies of this small sample was guided by the requirement that these must show conspicuous structure in order to illustrate the angular resolution achievabe in the flux maps. In so doing, PC images were always chosen because in WFPC2 images the galaxy cores are mostly imaged with this camera working at a smaller image scale on the focal plane with respect to the WFCs (see Section 6.1). All flux maps were obtained through stacking of 50 simulated observations obtained with $6\times4$ pixels/sample. Simulated observations were generated as described in Section 6.3, whereas stacking of observations was performed following the baseline stacking technique described in Section 6.4.