NGC2403

In my line of work, precision is everything. But sometimes, you need a pursuit where the payoff has zero practical utility—where the only return on investment is sheer, unadulterated curiosity. Back in early 2023, I set my sights on NGC 2403 (C7), an intermediate barred spiral galaxy spinning 8 million light-years away in Camelopardalis. Shooting from my northeast-facing balcony in downtown Guangzhou under crippling Bortle 7–9 light pollution, the background skyglow was so fierce that any exposure over 120 seconds would completely blow out the frame. My only option was brute force: shooting over 1,000 individual frames to accumulate 60 hours of raw data, stacked on an M1 Ultra Mac Studio. The resulting image certainly won't threaten Hubble or James Webb, but extracting that ancient cosmic whirlpool through city smog with my own hands was intensely rewarding.