Azimuthally-averaged intensity profiles (counts) as a function of the semi-major axis for the VISTA (top panel) and 2MASS data of NGC 253, in both J (blue points) and Ks (red points) bands. For the VISTA data, the intensity profile is also derived for the deep J band image (green points). The vertical lines indicate the outer radii corresponding to the ellipse of the limiting surface brightnesses for the imaging data in each band. They are R = 600 arcsec for the 2MASS images in both J and Ks bands (black vertical line in the bottom panel), and R = 1034 arcsec and R = 830 arcsec, for the shallow VISTA data (top panel) in the J (blue vertical line) and Ks (red vertical line) bands respectively, while for the deep J band image it is at R = 1305 arcsec (green vertical line). The horizontal lines indicate the residual counts in the background, which are ~0.08 in the 2MASS images (black horizontal line), and ~− 0.08 in the Ks image (red horizontal line), ~0.002 and ~0.06 in the J shallow and deep images (blue and green horizontal lines) for the VISTA data.