I am a little late to the table with my rendition of this very picturesque pair of interacting galaxies for this season. This of course has provided me the opportunity to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' who have come before
A number of challenges were presented during image capture with some very pesky gradients which would appear to have resulted from a nearby mag 5 star plus some seriously ugly seeing. I finished junking all of the luminance subs but I don't think that the image suffered because of it.
Given the dynamic range difference from the core to the outer arms/antenna, it was always going to be a challenge trying to capture this in a 5" refractor with a 1.5 degree FOV. To help with alleviating this, a little over 60 subs per channel were captured at 10 minutes per exposure. This has helped with achieving a reasonable SNR.
Link to image on Astrobin here.
Click on image in Astrobin for larger resolution.