This image is pretty bad. To get a better close-up, I tried a 2X barlow lens on the NP101is telescope. It did zoom in on the galaxy, but it also made it pretty dim. Always a trade off. And so the signal in raw images was about half as strong as it needed it to be. Maybe even less.
This caused the bright parts to show up. But the dim parts were lost in the darkness. The failure is not a big deal though. I really just wanted to see if the NP101is could take images with a barlow. And the answer actually is: yes it can. But to make it worth doing, the exposure time per frame needs to double (or more).
In practical terms, the real answer was to get a much larger scope that can bring in lots of light at a long focal length. Which is why I ended up with an EdgeHD. The difference big aperture makes on objects like this can be seen in the other image below.
