Here we have my try at M58, a very beautiful nearly face-on spiral located in Virgo. This is the most distant of all Messier objects at about 62 million light years away. It has a radius of about 58,000 light years and contains something like 400 billion stars. It is somewhat unique in that it appears to have an "Ultra Compact Nuclear Ring" which is a small ring around the nucleus where starburst activity is taking place and which surrounds a super massive black hole of about 70 million solar masses.

The foregoing from messier-objects.com.

As we all well know, learning how to do this avocation involves a steep learning curve. Accordingly, it seems as though as I learn, the things that I think are important in an image change. At first it was the wonderful colors, then it was trying to get round stars, then more details, then figuring out how to do noise reduction properly and on and on and on, lol... One thing that always has bothered me is big stars. Someday I know I will figure out how to remedy this issue. I don't like to do very much in the way of star reduction because I want to preserve the tiny non-stellar objects that are in the background of almost every image. At this point, when I do the star reduction, I work on any star mask that I might try to use for that until I have clone stamped out as many of those faint fuzzies as I possibly can. Seems to work OK but quite a tedious process to be sure and I then apply whatever star reduction I use very sparingly.

But in the end, while I have a long way to go, the enjoyment of this hobby never diminishes.

There are fewer examples of M58 here on Astrobin than I expected considering this is a Messier object but I find it to be a very beautiful galaxy. I really tried to be conservative in the addition of the Ha data so as not to overwhelm the image, but I think I could have pulled that up a little but I'm not sure I should, lol... I included a monochrome version and truth be told, I like the monochrome image better than the LRGB image.

Anyway, a nice project that has been sitting on my computer waiting to be finished while I have had other obligations. I hope you like it and Clear Skies to all!