The Surprising NGC300

[Russ.Carpenter]

Here is NGC300. It was the APOD for August 21, 2002 and, according to the narrative, is interesting because it is so “normal” (a perfect example of a spiral galaxy). However, it turned out that this same-old same-old galaxy wasn’t so prosaic after all. Two mysterious optical transient objects were discovered by an amateur astronomer in 2008 and 2010. And the core of NGC300 was determined to be a “new kind” of Wolf-Rayet black hole binary system. This image was captured by a 17 inch Planewave at iTelescope in Siding Springs, Australia. 2.4 hours of imaging time, divided equally among R, G and B, binned 1X1. The subs were aligned and stacked in PixInsight, all the rest was in StarTools, with small interventions with Affinity Photo.

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