Flocculent Intermediate Spiral Galaxy in Leo - NGC3521

Flocculent Intermediate Spiral Galaxy in Leo, NGC3521, located around 26 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Leo.

I imaged this galaxy almost a year ago and did not have a chance to process the data until now... having nights which seem to be permanently cloudy allowed me time to do some house keeping with data exposed in the past and occasionally come across unfinished projects.

This is my second attempt at this galaxy as my previous year's result was very soft with bloated stars... and even though this year's result is a slight improvement, I think that it's still far from perfect.

This galaxy is a difficult object to image because it is engulfed in a thick dusty haze which shifts the natural color of this galaxy toward red, making it look orange and this dust also seems to be softening the finer details.

Imaged using a 8" SCT at f6.3 (1280mm focal length), with a QHY268M camera on a HyperTuned CGEM mount for a total integration time of 31 hours and 25 minutes.

Software used to capture and stack this image was APT 4.01, PHD 2.6.11 and DSS 5.1.3.