The Mirror Galaxy (Messier 100), also known as NGC 4321 or the Blowdryer Galaxy, is located within the Virgo Cluster of galaxies. It is among the brightest and largest galaxies in the region and lies approximately 55 million light-years from Earth. Spanning roughly 166,000 light-years in diameter, it is about 1.6 times larger than the Milky Way.

This image was captured using a Nikon Z7 II and a NIKKOR Z 600mm f/6.3 lens. The final image is a stack of 85 exposures of 30 seconds each at ISO 3200, for a total integrated exposure time of 42.5 minutes. Additional frames would have helped further reduce the amount of noise reduction required in post-processing, but many exposures had to be discarded due to poorer seeing conditions earlier in the session. Star tracking was performed using a Fornax LighTrack II.

Individual frames were registered in DeepSkyStacker and subsequently sigma-clip averaged using program astro-sca. Sigma clipping was essential as there were numerous meteor streaks though many of the images. The resulting sigma-clipped file was then processed using program astro-color-stretch. A 100% vignette correction was done followed by a two pass asinh stretch, a single S-curve adjustment, and color correction.

Image sharpening was performed using 40 iterations of Richardson–Lucy deconvolution, followed by four-level Discrete Meyer wavelet enhancement. All of these processing operations were performed using astro-color-stretch.

Some final refinements were done using Capture One, followed by some additional noise reduction and sharpening using Topaz DeNoise AI.