Anyone been to Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO? One of the best family vacations I ever took was to this timeless theme park. There's plenty of fun rides and a lot of wild west charm; I highly recommend visiting if you're every in the area. When I learned that there was a silver dollar galaxy out there it brought back memories of that vacation and I decided I had to image it!
This is NGC 253, normally referred to as the Sculptor Galaxy (of course, I like Silver Dollar Galaxy better). It is a spiral starburst galaxy similar to the Fireworks Galaxy. It is at the center of the Sculptor galaxy group (which is close to our own local galaxy group) and is somewhere between 10 and 12 million light years away. At its center, scientists estimate that the Sculptor Galaxy houses a black hole approximately the same size as Sagittarius A. I wanted to accentuate the central region of this galaxy as best I could and you can clearly see it in this image (glowing yellowish orange right at the center). I'd like to think that one can just barely make out the event horizon surrounding the central black hole
John Herschel observed the Sculptor Galaxy in the early 1800s and he wrote that it contained only 4 stars which may or may not be part of the galaxy itself. I think it's really neat that you can see the four stars that he (presumably) was looking at when seeing this galaxy for the first time (they are the bluish stars near the center). I do not believe these stars are part of the galaxy.
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