We present ultraviolet ( UV ) images of nine starburst galaxies obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope using the Faint Object Camera .
The galaxies range in morphology from blue compact dwarfs to ultra-luminous merging far-infrared galaxies .
Our data combined with new and archival UV spectroscopy and far-infrared fluxes allow us to dissect the anatomy of starbursts in terms of the distributions of stars , star clusters and dust .

The overall morphology of starbursts is highly irregular , even after excluding compact sources ( clusters and resolved stars ) .
The irregularity is seen both in the isophotes and the surface brightness profiles .
In most cases the latter can not be characterized by either exponential or R ^ { 0.25 } profiles .
Most ( 7/9 ) starbursts are found to have similar intrinsic effective surface brightnesses , suggesting that a negative feedback mechanism is setting an upper limit to the star formation rate per unit area .
Assuming a continuous star formation rate and a Salpeter ( 1955 ) IMF slope , this surface brightness corresponds to an areal star formation rate of 0.7 \mbox { $M _ { \odot } $ } { Kpc ^ { -2 } yr ^ { -1 } } in stars in the mass range of 5 – 100 M _ { \odot } .

All starbursts in our sample contain UV bright star clusters indicating that cluster formation is an important mode of star formation in starbursts .
On average about 20 % of the UV luminosity comes from these clusters .
The clusters with M _ { 220 } < -14 mag , or super star clusters ( SSC ) are preferentially found at the very heart of starbursts ; over 90 % of the SSCs are found where the underlying surface brightness is within 1.5 mag arcsec ^ { -2 } of its peak value .
The size of the SSCs in the nearest host galaxies are consistent with those of Galactic globular clusters .
Our size estimates of more distant SSCs are likely to be contaminated by neighboring clusters and the underlying peaked high surface brightness background .
The luminosity function of SSCs is well represented by a power law ( \phi ( L ) \propto L ^ { \alpha } ) with a slope \alpha \approx - 2 .

We find a strong correlation between the far infrared excess and the UV spectral slope for our sample and other starbursts with archival data .
The correlation is in the sense that as the UV color becomes redder , more far-infrared flux is observed relative to the UV flux .
The correlation is well modeled by a geometry where much of their dust is in a foreground screen near to the starburst , but not by a geometry of well mixed stars and dust .
Some starbursts have noticeable dust lanes , or completely obscured ionizing sources , indicating that the foreground screen is not uniform but must have some patchiness .
Nevertheless , the reddened UV colors observed even in these cases indicates that the foreground screen has a high covering factor and can account for a significant fraction of the far-infrared flux .