Those who observed my galaxy images in the recent years saw that I struggled with the collimation of my 8" telecope for quite a few years. I finally overcame the problems in winter 2016/17 when I took a detailled picture of the great Andromeda galaxy. Now I tried to verify the success - along with my newly serviced mount - in March 2019 and spent 3 1/2 hours of exposure with the focal length reduced down to slightly above 1000mm. I struggled with this setup before, but I was eager to use the enhanced f-ratio to capture faint detail. What a difference my improvements made. The DSLR-format needed just a tiny bit of cropping to remove residual astigmatism, but the field of view nicely presents the famous galaxy discovered by William Herschel in 1784.

The galaxy is about 30 million light years away towards the spring time constellations and belongs to the larger supercluster of which the virgo-cluster is the most prominent center. It is one of those objects which are luminous enough that they could have ended up on Charles Messier's list of comet-like objects. Professional astronomers identified vivid star formation. The tiny little smudge to the left is the foregroud dwarf galaxy UGC 5086.