After seeing the image of this galaxy made by HST, I became fascinated with this galaxy, surrounded with globular clusters in hundreds. I was eager to catch them and my primary target was to reveal dust structures inside it, often not visible in wide field images of this galaxy. I'm not happy by the total exposure time I could get, but I'm happy with the final result. Many of surrounding globular cluster are clearly visible and after compressing dynamic range of the bright halo, dust structures revealed them self - spectacular for an amateur imaging.
I have planned to spend 4 nights on this object and I did so. Unfortunately, the data of three of those nights were unusable due to a bad seeing and fine details of dust lanes were simply smeared out. So, eventually I could use data of a single night which is only 16 subs, 900sec each. Since I have spent two months on this object (can image only 2 nights in a month) I decided not to spend more time by collecting additional data and try to process it anyway and see what can be done with it. Maybe I'll get back to it next year.
The image is a crop of course and I processed it separately to get more impression of the galaxy and small details.
16x900 @ ISO1600
Meade 10" ACF @ F8 @ 2025mm
Canon T3i Modded
Full Resolution
HERE.
