What appear as individual grains of sand on a beach in this image
obtained with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are actually myriads
of stars embedded deep in the heart of the nearby galaxy NGC 300.
The Hubble telescope’s exquisite resolution enables it to see the
stars as individual points of light, despite the fact that the
galaxy is millions of light-years away.

NGC 300 is a spiral galaxy similar to our own Milky Way. It
is a member of a nearby collection of galaxies known as the Sculptor
group, named for the southern constellation where the group can be
found. The distance to NGC 300 is 6.5 million light-years, making it
one of the Milky Way’s closer neighbors. At this distance, only the
brightest stars can be picked out from ground-based images. With
a resolution some 10 times better than ground-based telescopes,
Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) resolves many more stars
in this galaxy than can be detected from the ground.

A ground-based Digitized Sky Survey image of the full field of NGC
300 is shown in the top left frame. An outline of the Hubble Heritage
ACS image is marked and shown in the image in the top right frame. A
detailed blowup of this image (in the bottom frame) shows individual
stars in the galaxy. A background spiral galaxy is visible in the
lower right corner. The individual Hubble ACS exposures were taken in
July and September 2002.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)
Acknowledgment: F. Bresolin (Institute for Astronomy, U. Hawaii)
and the Digitized Sky Survey

NOTE TO EDITORS: For additional information, please contact
Fabio Bresolin, Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii,
2680 Woodlawn Drive, Honolulu, Hawaii USA, 96822, (phone) 808-956-8306,
(email) bresolin@ifa.hawaii.edu, or

Keith Noll, Hubble Heritage Team, Space Telescope Science
Institute, 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, (phone)
410-338-1828, (fax) 410-338-4579, (e-mail) noll@stsci.edu or

Electronic images and additional information are available at
http://hubblesite.org/news/2004/13
http://heritage.stsci.edu/2004/13

The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) is operated by
the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.
(AURA), for NASA, under contract with the Goddard Space Flight
Center, Greenbelt, MD. The Hubble Space Telescope is a project
of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space
Agency (ESA).