The Sombrero Galaxy is a unique galaxy characterized by a large, luminous central bulge and a prominent dust lane within its outer disk. Its unusual morphology gives it the appearance of a sombrero hat. Located near the border between the constellations Corvus and Virgo, it is associated with the Virgo II Groups of galaxies. The Sombrero Galaxy is slightly larger than the Milky Way, measuring approximately 100,000 light-years in diameter, and is located about 31 million light-years from Earth. 

This image was made with a Nikon Z7 II and a NIKKOR Z 600mm f/4 TC VR S, with the integrated 1.4× teleconverter engaged, for an effective focal length of 840 mm at f/5.6. The final image consists of 116 × 30-second exposures at ISO 1600, yielding a total integrated exposure time of 58 minutes. Star tracking was performed using a Fornax LighTrack II.

The frames were registered in DeepSkyStacker and subsequently sigma-clip averaged using program astro-sca. The resulting sigma-clipped file was then processed using program astro-color-stretch. A minor background gradient was corrected prior to stretching using a 50% correction strength. Image stretching consisted of a two-pass asinh stretch followed by a single S-curve adjustment and color correction.

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

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