Located on the celestial equator in the “head” of Leo, the Lion, this impressive galaxy is both large and bright and could have been easily seen by Messier.  It has a very bright, almost starlike core from which material appears to be ejected perpendicularly to the galaxy plane into a prominent halo.

Technical Details as follows:

Imaged by SSRO/PROMPT/CTIO in 2014 with a 16″ RCOS @ f/11.3, Apogee U9, and Planewave 200HR mount. Image scale 0.41″/pixel. This is the 2nd longest exposure in the history of SSRO — a total of 88 hours of LRGB data.  Calibration in Maxim, alignment/integration in PixInsight, deconvolution in PixInsight, and everything else in Photoshop.