Many of the quite numerous and small, slightly fuzzy objects are undoubtedly globular clusters of NGC 253. North is up and East is left. The observations were made on December 17, 1998. The crater just below the centre is Mairan and the one about halfway between these two and of about the same size is Sharp . The right-hand side of the picture was cropped in this reproduction to reduce the file size.
North is up and East is left.
Other important applications include the search for supernovae in distant clusters of galaxies and the optical identification of the rapidly fading gamma-ray bursters which are detected by space observatories, but for which only very crude positional determinations are available. Moreover, these CCD's supply digital data ready for computer analysis, whereas photographic plates must be digitized with a sophisticated scanning engine in a laborious and expensive manner which nevertheless cannot fully extract all the information. The price to be paid, until even larger CCD's become available, is the smaller field. The entire detector array of the WFI can be read out in only 27 seconds. Even for the most powerful PC's presently available, this can be a real challenge.