Known as the Needle Galaxy for its narrow profile, viewed edge on it is probably the most spectacular edge on Galaxy I have seen. I had look visually before I connected the Canon up. A central bulge was very noticeable and the arms just visible in my 90mm. I would love a look soon through our societies 20" http://www.brecklandastro.org.uk/
For set up and framing of an image I usually set the camera to 3200 Iso to capture a faint fuzzy, When I programmed the imaging run I set the Iso to 3200. I have never used such a high setting on a long run of images before. I tried it on M42 but was not happy with the noise and never published the image. I have no stock of 3200 darks either so I thought the run would be a waste of time. Needless to say I was pleasantly surprised with the result. As I mentioned no darks, flats bias frames used. A fine gradient removal was used to even out the image. A visible central bulge and a dust lane gives me the result I was hoping for.
