M98 is a spiral galaxy which also displays some evidence of a central bar. Our view of this pretty galaxy is almost edge on. One of the faintest galaxies in Messier's catalogue, M98 is also believed to be a member of the Virgo cluster of galaxies.

In this photo, North is up. This image is cropped to 62% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Celestron focal reducer
Focal Length	1160mm
Focal Ratio	f/5.8
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 inch Byers gear
Guiding	ONAG On-Axis Guider, Lodestar autoguider, PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified (Baader Mod)
Exposure	100 subexposures of 300 seconds each at ISO 1600 - 8 1/3 hours total exposure
Calibration	20 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	April 30 and May 11, 2013
Temperature	49F on 4/30, 59F on 5/11
SQM Reading	21.65 (Bortle 4) on both nights
Seeing	3/5 on both nights
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 5.0 for camera control, Images plus 5.5 for calibration, stacking, digital development, star size reduction and halo reduction, smoothing and noise reduction, advanced Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, and multiresolution sharpening. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, high pass filter, star shrinking, screen mask invert, lab color, saturation adjustments, match color, and selective color. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Straton for star removal. Carboni Tools for additional noise reduction, and smoothing. HLVG for additional color correction. Registar for aligning stacks. Focus Magic for focus restoration.
Notes	M98 is not commonly photographed, which certainly surprises me. The galaxy has a lot of interesting details, and the surrounding field has a number of very nice background galaxies. Overall, I'm fairly pleased with this image, as I like the color and nice details in the main galaxy.