Title:
Interpretation of the images of galaxies

Abstract:
Astronomers now have created massive digital data sets of nearby
galaxies as well as very distant ones (seen as they were some eight
billion years in the past). Determining how the structure of these
galaxies has changed over time requires a careful interpretation of
their images --- accounting for the variation with distance of the
resolution, signal-to-noise ratio, and rest-frame wavelength of the
observations. I briefly review the state-of-the-art techniques for
doing so, and present a vision of how these approaches can be
improved to more precisely understand the growth and evolution of
galaxies.