This is my image of M104, the Sombrero Galaxy captured with an 11 inch aperture SCT on April 19 2017 and earlier.   M104 has a diameter of 50,000 light years which is half that of our own Milky Way; it is 29 million light years from Earth and extends 8.5 arcminutes across the night sky; the Sombrero Galaxy extends over an angular width only 1/20th that of the Andromeda Galaxy's width. 

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Please note the bright nucleus at the center of this galaxy where a supermassive black hole having the mass of 100 billion Suns is located. The gravity from an object as massive as this pulls in and compresses large amounts of hydrogen gas into an accretion disk which consequently heats up and glows; that's why the central nucleus is so bright.

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The Sombrero Galaxy's small angular size makes it difficult to image clearly because of the more stringent demands placed upon seeing, focusing and autoguiding. Also details of M104 such as the mottled surface along the interior of the band of dust along its equator are relatively low contrast features which require long camera exposure times to capture in a satisfactory manner. Finally M104 has a minus 11.7 degree declination which means that viewing from Maryland's 39 degree northern latitude places the galaxy at lower elevations throughout the night making seeing an even more critical issue. 

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I captured this image of M104 using a C11 SCT, an F/6.3 Reducer, an On Axis Guider, an ATIK 460EX main imaging camera and Lodestar X2 guide camera. 

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I captured 88 minutes of Luminance data on April 19 2017 which I combined with my 290 minutes of RGB data and 101 minutes of Luminance data that I captured in May 2016.