Composite surface brightness profile along the major axis of NGC 253. The green triangles and magenta circles show surface brightness profiles extracted along the North-East and South-West major axes directions from the J-band early commissioning data. Small light blue dots trace the average J-band surface brightness profile. Small black dots are the number density profile of star members of NGC 253, corrected for crowding effects, and scaled to the surface brightness profile between 15–18 arcmin from the center. The error bars are Poissonian from counts and also include the foreground/background estimated errors. The dashed line (not a fit) helps to better see the continuity of the surface brightness and scaled number density profiles.