NGC 7479 is beautiful example of a barred spiral galaxy. The galaxy is classified as a Seyfert galaxy due to its active nucleus. The two arms of the galaxy seem to meet together to form a faint halo around the galaxy. Photographically, NGC 7479 is a challenging object, as it is only about 4' by 3'.

In this image, North is up, This image is a tight crop to 37% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Celestron focal reducer
Focal Length	1160mm (measured from the image)
Focal Ratio	f/5.8
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 Byers gear
Guiding	ONAG On-Axis Guider, Lodestar autoguider, PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified
Exposure	175 subexposures of 180 seconds each at ISO 1600 - 8 3/4 hours total
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	August 23 and 24, 2012
Temperature	63F on both nights
SQM Reading	21.5 (Bortle 4) on 8/23, 21.4 (Bortle 4) on 8/24
Seeing	4/5 on both nights
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.5 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, adaptive Richardson-Lucy deconvolution, multiresolution sharpening, smoothing and noise reduction. Registar used for stack alignment. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, color correction, selective color, match color, high pass filter, star shrinking, lab color, saturation adjustments, screen mask invert, hdr toning, and smart sharpen. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Carboni Tools for additional saturation adjustments, noise reduction, and smoothing. HLVG for additional color correction.
Notes	This galaxy was very challenging due to its small apparent size. I was fairly pleased with the details I was able to capture, and I also imaged a number of nice, tiny background galaxies. This image one 1st place in the Astrophotogallery.org's August 2012 Hard-Galaxy competition.