M77, in the lower right of the image, is a face-on spiral galaxy located about 60 million light-years from our solar system. It is an example of a Seyfert galaxy with an active nucleus, and is a fairly bright object that can be seen in small telescopes. Large telescopes are required to see the spiral arms. NGC 1055 is an edge-on spiral galaxy that is part of the same group as M77.

Equipment: ST-10XME/Vixen 102-ED/Losmandy G-11/Gemini/Astrodon RGB filters
F-ratio: f/6.5
Exposure: LRGB: L 8 x 5 minutes, binned 1x1: R  8 x 5 minutes: G 8 x 5 minutes: B 8 x 5 minutes: RGB binned 2x2
Date: December 3, 2005
Location: Landers, California, USA
Technical Notes: Exposures were dithered using CCDAutoPilot2 and then sigma combined. The RGB images were combined in Registar 1.0. Unsharp Mask was selectively applied to the brightest portions of the luminance image at 100% with a radius of 1 pixel and a threshold of 0. A Gaussian Blur of 1 pixel was applied to the dim portions of the luminance image and to the RGB image.