"NGC 300 (also known as Caldwell 70) is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Sculptor. It is one of the closest galaxies to the Local Group, and probably lies between the latter and the Sculptor Group. It is the brightest of the five main spirals in the direction of the Sculptor Group. It is inclined at an angle of 42° when viewed from Earth and shares many characteristics of the Triangulum Galaxy. It is 94,000 light-years in diameter, somewhat smaller than the Milky Way, and has an estimated mass of (2.9 ± 0.2) × 10^10 M☉.”….Wikipedia
It is estimated to be 6.07 ± 0.23 Mly away and has an apparent diameter of 21.9′ × 15.5′.
This is one of the first, if not the first galaxy I ever imaged and I really like it. I think the resemblance to M33 is quite striking. The Ha signal is strong and there are many large knots of hydrogen clouds througout the spiral arms. Once again I used the Continuum Mapping process to subtract the broadband red signal from the Ha, before using the clean Ha image to enhance the red and to a lesser extent the blue to highlight the Ha emission areas in the galaxy. I was careful not to overdo the inclusion and I hope you feel I have it about right.
I am intrigued by the structure of NGC 300. To my eye it seems that some of the spiral arms cross each other, or more likely are in different planes. The one towards the top of the galaxy in the image, close to parallel to the x-axis seems to be clearly in front of the diagonal spiral arm that it occludes. There are also remarkably straight sections as we see in other galaxies such as M101 and I think these are sufficiently distinct to be labelled as Vorontsov-Velyaminov rows.
@Gary Imm what do you think?
I think the galaxy is close enough for individual star clusters to be resolved but probably not stars. The number of distant galaxies that can be seen through this large foreground galaxy is amazing.
A zoomed in version (Revision B) can be accessed via the mouse-over.
Revision C shows a simulation of what the galaxy would look like if truly face-on. This was created with the skew function in Photoshop. Whilst I stated that this image is a face-on spiral in Sculptor, it is actually close to half way between face-on and edge on.
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