M74 - Phantom Galaxy, 5 hours with 550D

[Jannis]

It was a clear, windless, and moonless night here a couple of days ago, and so i gave this slightly faint and small target a go.

I must say this was much fainter then i expected, but i think the 5 hours of data helped a bit to drag out some of the fainter arms. It's still a bit blurry though, but i'm not sure if my tracking will allow me to get it much sharper.

Captured with the 550D and the Explorer 200, stacked in DSS and processed in PS. 30x 600s exposures at ISO800. Flats added, but they didn't work 100% well.
While i'm quite happy with it, i'm not sure if i was able to process this to it's best. In case someone want to have a go at it, i also attach an unprocessed image of the same crop.

M74 30x 10m iso800_reg.tif