The Whirlpool Galaxy is a stunning face-on spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. It is located about 31 million light-years from earth and can be relatively easily found as it is very near the end of the handle of the big dipper.

This image was made with a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikon 600mm f/4 lens. A total of 106 30-second exposures at ISO 3200 were made for a total of 53 minutes of exposure time. Star tracking was with a Fornax Lightrack II.

Individual frames were registered in DeepSkyStacker and sigma-clip averaged using program astro-sca. Sigma clipped averaging helped eliminate meteor streaks present in numerous frames. The resulting stacked sigma-clipped averaged file was then processed using program astro-color-stretch. Stretching was a two pass asinh stretch followed by a single S-curve adjustment, and color correction. The image was sharpened with a 40 iteration of Richardson–Lucy deconvolution, followed by a 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.