C65 – The Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253)

NGC 253, also commonly known as the Sculptor Galaxy or Caldwell 65 (C65), is a large, nearly edge-on spiral galaxy, and is one of the closest galaxies beyond our local group of galactic neighbors. This photogenic object shows complex structures of clumpy gas clouds, darkened dust lanes, and young, luminous central star clusters. Caroline Herschel discovered NGC 253 in 1783 while looking for comets. The galaxy's relatively large size and brightness make it an ideal target for amateur astronomers, though it is low in the sky for observers in the northern hemisphere—barely 13 degrees above the horizon at its highest in Bath, England, where Caroline Herschel did much of her observing. Its host constellation, Sculptor, is generally considered a southern constellation. The picture's stair-step appearance results from the design of Hubble’s Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2). The upper-left quarter of the camera's detector (as viewed here) was designed for high-magnification planetary imaging. Used in conjunction with the other three quarters of the detector to form a single, wide-field view requires this section of the image to be shrunk to match the scale of the others, leaving a portion blank (dark).