Well, I took a Hubble image. Nine images, to be precise. Well, Hubble took them by itself, and then I just took them from the archive and touched them here and there A LOT. However, very little cheating: only stacking (4x1000s for the red and blue channels), clipping, and gamma correction. Then, Photoshop of course. The usual stuff: dehaze, contrast, clarity, and vibrance/saturation, heavily altered tone curve. Noise reduction. The only spot correction I did, though, was the tiny red ring in the background, which wasn’t as red, and I wanted it to stand out.
But yeah, you can see how the Hubble team themselves managed the task ages ago: https://www.spacetelescope.org/images/opo0221a/. Looks like they knew what they were doing, but I think it’s close enough.
Oh, and that's the scarce info we have of the galaxy itself:Â https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoag's_Object
