Messier 74 (M74) is a prototypical "grand design spiral-arm galaxy". It is oriented facing us and we see very clear spiral arms. It is large (in the sky) because it is relatively close to us (32 million light years away). Our nearest neighbor galaxy, Andromeda, is only 2.5 million light years away.
M74 is #74 in the Messier catalog of "objects that might look like comets but are not comets". It was actually discovered by Pierre François André Méchain in 1780 who dutifully informed Charles Messier about the object. Pierre Méchain was a geodesist.
This galaxy has a low surface brightness, meaning the glowing light of the spiral arms is quite dim. As a result it is also known as the Phantom Galaxy.
The image shown here was captured on October 28, 2021. 76 frames of 60 seconds were retained and stacked. I find the spiral arms very clearly presented and individual stars are easily viewed in those spiral arms. I consider this to be a very good image for me.
The night sky was particularly clear and I believed the atmospheric seeing to be better than usual. Therefore I doubled the resolution when stacking ("2x drizzle"), which runs the risk of creating noise but can produce better images if the resolution existed before sampling via the digital camera. When the atmosphere is bad the inherent resolution is poor and the drizzle process just makes things worse.
Normally with the RASA-11 and 6200 camera each pixel represents 1.25 by 1.25 seconds of arc on the sky, but in this image, with drizzling, the pixels are 0.63 arcseconds across.
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