he Messier Catalog is a collection of 110 star clusters, nebulae, and galaxies that Charles Messier found while he was looking for comets in the 1700's. Because of the small telescopes at the time, these objects are some of the biggest/brightest ones visible in the sky, and are popular targets for amateur astronomers to observe and photograph. Though it is possible to observe them all in one night, I opted to sink anywhere from 30 mins to 19 hours into each one in order to produce the best images possible with my equipment. I technically started on this catalog the first night I did astrophotography (I did M101), but it wasn't until last spring that I started photographing star clusters and really pushing to photograph all 110 objects. The majority of these were shot from the roof of my light polluted apartment in downtown Athens, GA (bortle 7), but I also traveled to dark sites for some of them.

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Processing:

This is an extremely generalized processing workflow in PixInsight. If you want to see the specific processing I did for each image then click on the links in my reply to this comment

Calibrate with dark and flat frames (bias frames also used for DSLR images)

Stack individual frames together to create a single image with high SNR. (This combines many images each with a few minutes of exposure into images which effectively have several hours of exposure, and rejects out any satellites that flew in front of the camera)

Crop (removes stacking artifacts)

Background extraction

Deconvolution sharpening and noise reduction

Color calibration (not necessary for false color images

Stretch to nonlinear state (this brightens the picture. The images straight off the camera are very close to black)

More noise reduction

Final tweaks of contrast, luminance, color balance, and saturation curves

Crop/resample to 1000x1000 for mosaic image, which was then assembled in Photoshop

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Some highlights/superlatives:

M16: The famous 'Pillars of Creation' are located at the center of this nebula

M31: The Andromeda Galaxy, which is naked eye visible under dark skies

M40: The sexiest Messier object.

M45: The closest Messier object (430ly). In japanese the cluster is called 'Subaru' and is the logo for the car company. The stars are naked eye visible even under moderate light pollution

M65/66: These are the oldest photos in the composite (photographed March 22nd, 2018). I had previously done some of the other objects but I reshot them at later dates. These galaxies are also part of the Leo Triplet.

M70: The newest photo in the composite (photographed June 25th, 2020)

M87: The small blue splotch in this galaxy is the relativistic jet of material shot out by the black hole that was photographed last year. Coincidentally I took this photo on the same night that the photo was released

M101: This was the first space object I ever photographed, and I ended up reshooting it twice to track my improvement. (Don't plan on reshooting it this year, though)

M109: The most distant Messier object (~83 Million ly), though some sources say that M58 is further away.

89 were photographed from my apartment roof in downtown Athens, GA

10 were photographed from dark sites (Bortle 3/4) (M6, M7, M33, M41, M44, M69, M70, M78, M79, M101

7 are false color images (M8, M16, M17 M18, M43, M52, and M76)