The Cigar Galaxy is a starburst galaxy.   Starburst activity is thought to be triggered by interaction with neighboring galaxy M81.   In 2005 Hubble revealed 197 massive clusters in the starburst core.   The average mass of those clusters is 200,000 solar masses making it a high density and high energy environment.    The Cigar Galaxy is prone to frequent supernova.   I've been intrigued with Harold Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies published in 1996 at Caltech.   This one, Arp 337, is simply beautiful.   I'm working my way though the Arp Atlas.   

This image was captured over a week in mid October 2022 on my PlaneWave CDK24 / L-600 using a Moravian C3-61000EC PRO (extra cooling) camera using a gain of 2750 (Moravian number - the sweet spot for QE / noise).   Position angle is 0 degrees.    Images were captured using R, G, B and Ha filters.   The Ha narrow band added a bit of detail.

This image is the product of an excellent collaboration with Bray Falls.   In early 2020 we started working together.  Bray is an outstanding Pixinsight expert who helped me come up to speed on a basic working knowledge of Pixinsight.  It became quickly clear that my time was best spent on image capture and optimizing the equipment and software.   Bray would work on post processing using Pixinsight, Photoshop, BXT and other software tools.   I'd add a bit of LightRoom processing from time to time.   I'm really pleased with the results from this collaboration which has only gotten better and better.   

Additional notes:   In mid 2022 at the suggestion of Bob Denny (ACP) image exposure time changed to 300 second exposures using Bin 2.   For several years  600 second exposures unbinned  was standard (for me - for all IMX455 sensor cameras).   This change improved the image capture process significantly.  The C3-61000 uses the Sony IMX455 60mp sensor.   Unbinned,  129 megabyte files cause no end of problems with plate solving.   Moving to 300s at Bin2 improved sensitivity and produced smaller 30 megabyte files which are more easily digested by plate solve software like Visual Pinpoint.    The image capture process is now fully automated in ACP, Visual Pinpoint and ACP Scheduler.    ACP is now configured to plate solve and recenter (and set position angle to 0 degrees)  after every image capture.   The drift on the L-600 mount is consistently measured at less than 2 arc-seconds over this 300s image capture.   No dithering has been used - but worth a look.   Refocusing is done every hour.   In November 2022 a separate guider scope was added reducing the drift even further.   A day or two of mount tuning by the techs at PlaneWave reduced slew settle time to a few seconds and optimized the tracking feedback loop.