I spent quite some time with this project - not only in acquisition but also processing.
I did my best to do this part of the sky justice. After about 10 hours of Luminance I did a prestack to check for interesting features and to figure out, how much longer I wanted to go.
I found there are interesting, faint tidal structures around the galaxy arms. Also there seems to be some dust between us and M74.
I decided to add more Luminance and ended up with 24 hours and a total of >40 hours incl. Ha.
Unfortunately, the dust is barely visible (but detectable) in the finished image (Revision B, larger field of view), especially in the bottom right and in front of the bright stars in the bottom left. I kept the brightness of the background up in favour of this faint details.
As this is one of my deepest exposures up to now I decided to annotate the image with different catalogues to see what faint objects and high magnitudes are visible - especially looking into Quasars blew my mind: There are several Quasars in this image with mag(r) of > 22 and/or a redshift > 3, which translates into a distance of around 18.5 billion light years, while the light has been travelling for only 11.5 billion years - ok, had to stop and think about that one for a moment:
"
z tells you the number of years the light from the object has traveled to reach us, however this is not the distance to the object in light years, because the universe has been expanding as the light traveled and the object is now much farther away. "(
https://lco.global/spacebook/light/redshift/)
So those photons escaped from that black hole long before even our sun or earth were born, traveled through the universe, just to hit my sensor. "Wow" is the only unpoetic expression that comes to my mind.
Enjoy checking it out (Revision C)
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