Spiral galaxy NGC 253

This photo shows a sky field around the Spiral Galaxy NGC 253 (Type Sc) seen nearly edge-on. It is located in the southern constellation Sculptor at a distance of about 8 million light-years. The image is the sum of five 5-min exposures through a blue (B-band) optical filtre. They were slightly offset with respect to each other so that the small gaps between the eight CCD''''s of the mosaic are no longer visible. This image also shows the faint trails of 2 artificial satellites. Many of the quite numerous and small, slightly fuzzy objects are undoubtedly globular clusters of NGC 253. The image processing consisted of de-biassing, flat-fielding, and removal (by interpolation) of some bad columns. The full-width-half-maximum (FWHM) of stellar images is about 1.0 arcsec. It was rebinned (2x2) to 4kx4k size and sampling 0.48 arcsec/pixel.North is up and East is left.