Once you get past the members of the Local Group, the next nearest galaxies are in the Sculptor cluster. Back in November last year I posted an image of NGC 253 and this time it’s the turn of NGC 247 in the constellation of Cetus.
At a distance of about 12 million light years this is a rather distorted spiral galaxy, with a prominent star at one end and a sparce void at the other. Being relatively close, the galaxies in this group appear quite large, this one is about 2/3 of the diameter of the full moon in length but is too faint to be visible to the naked eye. The small galaxy in the lower right of the image is PGC002795 (ESO540-026).
This is a picture taken with GRAS-006 in Australia and consists of 3 five minute exposures. GRAS-006 is an RCOS 16? – FL 3654mm @ f/9.0 with an SBIG STL-1001E NABG camera.