M74--A Ghostly Spiral

M74 is not only a difficult object to see through a telescope, it is challenging to image in light-polluted skies. This image was taken with the 14 inch ACF at F/6.3 with the Xtreme. Gain was 4 with a 90 second exposure. I had to do some histogram adjustment to pull the galaxy out of the background skyglow (there are too many car dealerships on the other side of town--Lafayette has a huge light pollution footprint for such a small town), so the image is rather noisy. I also cropped the image to cut out amp glow and some vignetting.