M74 is a magnificent spiral galaxy about 32 million light years away in the constellation of Pisces. It has quite low surface brightness which makes it quite a hard galaxy to observe. It bears a passing resemblance to M101 I always think, but is much dimmer.
Imaged on 15th December 2022 when to The South. I used my TEC 140 refractor with its field flattener, an Atik 460 CCD camera with Astrodon E series 1.25″ LRGB filters. All on my MESU 200 mount which was off-axis guided. The objective lens was very dirty and I cleaned it the following day. Despite that, the image came out quite nice.
This image is made from quite a modest data set comprising the following
LUM > 12 x 300s ; Red > 9 x 300s ; Green 9 x 300s ; Blue > 9 x 300s
Which gives a total integration (exposure) time of three hours and fifteen minutes in total.
I captured the data with NINA software and did all processing with PixInsight.
