NGC300 Spiral Galaxy in Sculptor
NGC300 is a faint galaxy in the austral Sculptor constellation.
It is very nice and no so photographed as its better known and more brilliant NGC253 (“Silver Coin” galaxy) neighbour.
The NGC300 galaxy is located at about 6 million light-years away from Earth. This is a typical spiral galaxy and its plane is tilted 42° respect to our line of sight.
Its spiral arms show a bluish coloration because in these areas new stars are being produced, while the central part with older stars show a yellow/brown colour.
It is believed that at the centre of this galaxy there are a couple of dark holes, conforming a binary system that is an important X Ray source.
There are also some reddish spots revealing the places where the energetic radiations coming from the massive young stars are heating and ionizing the gases.
As is common when you shot at a galaxy, it is possible see a lot of other far and (apparently) small galaxies at the background (41 in this picture), as showed in the annotated image:
Technical Data
| Acquisition site | Pueblo Doyle, Buenos Aires, Argentina |
| Acquisition date | 11-7-2015 |
| Instrument | Newton GSO F4 200 with GPU coma corrector. |
| Mount | Sky-Watcher NEQ6, managed by EQmod |
| Guide | Off-Axis, with Lodestar camera |
| Camera | Modified Canon 600D/T3i No IR Filter (Full Spectrum mod, using Astronomik MC Clear) Refrigerated (regulated temperature) |
| Camera sensor temperature | 5°C (on-sensor measured and regulated) |
| Filter | Astronomik Clip CLS CCD |
| Integration | 20 x 10 minutes subframes - ISO 1600 Total integration time: 3 hs 20 minutes |
| Calibration | 49 flats, 300 bias, 53 darks. |
| Resolution | 1.1 arcsec/pixel 787 mm actual focal, 4.2 um x 4.2 um pixels |
| Native size | 5202 x 3465 pixels |
| Cropped size | 3200 x 1800 pixels |
| FOV | 58’ x 33’ |
| Image center coordinates | RA: 00h 54m 57s Dec: -37° 40' 20" Rotation: -173° |
| Process | PixInsight 1.8 |