M77 located in the constellation Cetus is a very large edge on spiral galaxy. It's outer extensions go beyond what is seen in this image out to a diameter of 170,000 light years ! It is located 60 million light years away which is 30 times farther than the Andromeda galaxy ( 2 million light years) yet it is easily seen in small scopes !
This image is a 4X10 minute LRGB taken with an MX7c ccd camera and 11" Celestron Ultima using AstroArt 2.0 and Star 2000 interface for guiding at f3.3 . The four images were batch processed in AA 2.0 to create the LRGB integrated channels then combined to create the final image . A star bloat filter was added to the luminance to sharpen the image a bit and color then balanced using "Gimp for Windows". The image was then resampled in Iview to produce a "closer" view of the galaxy yet retain the image quality.