M96 initially intrigued me with its one-arm apperance.  I've since found it is described as a double barred spiral   But what also interested me was what appeared to be a second core in the outer arm.  Looking at deeper images revealed that second core to be 2MFGC 8391, which is seen through M96 and about 5x more distant.  This galaxy is strikingly similar to NGC 891.  

I've seen a large range in color representations on M96.  For color calibration I used the PI Color Calibration tool with structure detection which focuses on the star colors.  This produced a quite red 2MFGC 8391 and a range of color in the galaxy that appears to represent the expected structures of blue giants, magentna H2 regions and a yellow-ish core.  I'm not sure this is any more accurate than the other color representations I've seen, but I liked it.

My FWHM cut-off on Luminance was 2.4".  But most of the subs were considerably better with about half being below 2".  I left in some of the less sharp subs to try and show as much of the dim outer arms as I could.  Those arms required an agressive stretch.  HDRMT was used to bring detail back to the core after that stretch.  The stretch also ballooned the stars and made for a noisy background.  To resolve that I did a second stretch with the Masked Stretch tool and used that for the background and stars via a mask.  With masked stretch I didn't need to denoise the background at all.  Color data was stretched twice with a combination of ArcSinh and a histogram transformation stretch.  Those were blended to get some of the contrast from the HT stretch and the star colors from the AS stretch.

I find that when I have sharp data to start with deconvolution and sharpening efforts usually don't produce much effect and sometimes make things worse.  The HDRMT process acts something like a sharpening anyway.  So there was just a tiny bit of Unsharp masking in Photoshop applied to increase contrast in the galaxy detail.  

Color contrast was added to the galaxy in LAB space.  The stars were shielded from this and only had broad saturation adjustments.

I have finally made the effort to try new control programs.  As such the data were captured with three different control programs; CCDAutoPilot, NINA, and Voyager.  Many thanks to Curtis Tsai and Tim Hutchison for advice and hours of help with setting these up.  My change allowed me to finally use PHD for guiding, which immediately got my FWHM numbers closer to the seeing meters.  The multi-star guiding option is really the way to go.  As of now I'm moving forward with Voyager.