Hi Janet,

Thanks for your nice comment. Guess I'm comparing the image with one
of a similar size and brightness galaxy in the SBIG advertisement in
Feb S&T. That was given 80 minutes exposure for illuminance (as well
as all the extra for the RGB frames) and has the high contrast and
excellent detail I would like to achieve.
I used AstroArt to take the frames using an MX516USB CCD, and the
preprocessing tool to automatically add and align the frames. I used
PhotoShop 7.0 to finally produce an image which gave detail in the
arms without washing out the core of the galaxy. This required the
production of two images using AstroArt's histogram facility, one
processed for detail in the faint regions, and the other for detail
in bright regions. These were then combined in PhotoShop using
unsharp masking. Usually this would be achieved using images of short
exposure for the bright regions and long exposures for the rest, but
on this occassion my "long" exposure only half filled the 16bit
capacity of the images and hence didn't overexpose the core.
Underexposure left me with noticable noise and that inhibited the
degree of sharpening the image would stand. Unfortunately my Grain
Surgery software doesn't like PhotoShop 7.0 (was great with 6.0) and
I'm looking into that problem.

Clear Skies,
Serena