Although it is expected that blue light should be prevalent in a spiral galaxy due to the ongoing star formation happening in the disk, we failed to consider the fact that NGC 7814 is viewed edge-on from Earth when writing our hypothesis. The geometry of an edge-on galaxy minimizes the amount of blue light that we receive, since most of the disk is not visible. Blue light is primarily found in the disk, which is obscured due to the fact that NGC 7814 is an edge-on galaxy. If we were to look at a galaxy that is viewed face-on, the intensity in shorter wavelength filters would be much stronger as the entire face of the disk is visible.
Furthermore, we failed to consider the effects of interstellar dust when viewing the galaxy through the filters. The interstellar medium is filled with dust grains that are similar in size to the wavelength of blue light. When light travels through the dust, blue light is more often scattered and absorbed by the interstellar dust in a process called interstellar reddening. The result is that a portion of the blue light being emitted by the galaxy will not be observed, making the objects we see appear redder than they actually are. This has profound effects on our analysis, since most of the light we see are actually of longer wavelengths. The g’ filter only allowed the transmission of shorter wavelengths, so when NGC 7814 was viewed through the g’ filter, a limited amount of light was getting through the filter since most of the light consisted of longer wavelengths rather than short wavelengths. In contrast, the r’ filter allowed the transmission of longer wavelengths, and therefore had a higher flux, as proven by our analysis using aperture photometry.
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