On a rare clear night, I wanted to improve the auto-focus routine, and spent some time getting it pretty close, Then I picked a promising object somewhat at random, which turned out surprisingly well.
NGC 2775 has a very tight spiral structure with very fine detail that reminds me of M63, the “sunflower” galaxy, but a bit more face on. It’s also about a third of the angular size and almost twice as far, about 55 million light years. The image showed a pretty bland disk:
until processed with Maxim’s DDP and wavelet filter. The processing reveals the curdled knots in the disk, and a dust lane at top. I’m also interested in the little clump of presumably background galaxies to the left of the galaxy. They certainly look like they are associated with each other, but don’t seem to be part of a named group. They do have catalog numbers from the USNOA2 catalog (two of them are USNOA2 0900-06308497 and 0900-06308509)