M104 – The sombrero Galaxy

M104 – Astro-Physics 127.mm f/8, 0,78x reducer, Nikon D750a, 40x180s, ISO100, PixInsight, BlurXterminator, NoiseXterminator, ArcSinh Stretch, 2x drizzle

Since about 30 years ago, when an astronomy club colleague showed me M104 the sombrero galaxy in a 20×60 binocular it was one of my favourite deep sky objects.
A night after the great Aurora Display of 2024 I joined a friend who was imaging the Leo triplet, and had a go at M104 using the Starfire 127mm on the G-11 mount. We had a fun evening, saw some faint meteors, watched the milky way slowly rising.

The field of M104 is littered with smaller background galaxies:

As the galaxy is pretty small in the frame I increased the resolution of the final image by using the drizzle mechanism in PixInsight, which increases the resolution of the calibrated images before stacking.