I worked on Messier 74 - the Phantom Galaxy - on 2 nights last week. This galaxy is small and dim as seen from my little piece of planet, but still bright enough to be seen optically by Pierre Méchain in 1780 and to be confirmed and cataloged by Messier. Despite this, I'm feeling under-powered - this object isn't covering many pixels on my camera and I'd like it to be sharper. I shall have words with management. I restarted the post processing of this data set 3 times trying to squeeze some more out of it; I'm fed up with looking at it.

I've reduced the stars in two of the images to pull out the galaxy better. The full array of stars - all in the Milky Way and in front of M74 - are shown in the 4th image.

To paraphrase Wikipedia:

Messier 74 is a large spiral galaxy in the constellation Pisces. It is about 32 million light-years away from Earth - almost 30 million light years further away than the Andromeda Galaxy. This galaxy contains two clearly defined spiral arms and is therefore used as an archetypal example of a grand design spiral galaxy. The galaxy's low surface brightness makes it the most difficult Messier object for amateur astronomers to observe. It is estimated that M74 hosts about 100 billion stars.

There are several interesting blurs in the empty spaces of the images. I've picked the two largest to show here. I'm sure they are real, and they could be nebulae or very small or distant galaxies. There are hints of distant edge-on spiral galaxies in the images too.