Detail of 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 CCDs of the mosaic are no longer visible. This image also shows the faint trails of 2 artificial satellites. It contains some fainter and smaller background galaxies. 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 is a subimage of another image, but at the full original sampling of 0.24 arcsec/pixel. It covers about 2kx2k, or about 1/16 of the full field. North is up and East is left.