I hope that this is a more interesting depiction of M34 than usual.
My experience with M39 and
M15 taught me to take a little deeper look at some of these more pedestrian Messier targets. But unlike both of those objects, M34 doesn't seem to be framed against anything terribly interesting. There's some Ha in the area, which adds a bit of interest to it. And there are a ton of distant galaxies in this wide field--some of which may deserve a deeper look with a longer focal length. NGC 1003, in the far lower-right corner of the image, is part of the NGC 1023 group of galaxies and is about 36 million light years away. Compare that to the group of galaxies above and just to the right of center (including NGC 995, 996, 999, 1000, 1001, and 1005), which are 170 to 250 million light years distant.
So with this, I've now shot 80 Messier objects. 30 more to go!
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