M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy (blastrophoto)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: M 63 · NGC 5055 · Sunflower Galaxy

M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy, blastrophoto

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M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

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M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

M63, also known as the Sunflower galaxy, is a spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici with approximately 400 billion stars. M63 was first discovered by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain, then later verified by his colleague Charles Messier on June 14, 1779. There is a general lack of large-scale continuous spiral structure in visible light, so it is considered a flocculent galaxy. Although it only has two arms, many appear to be winding around its yellow core in this image captured from International Dark Site, Cherry Springs State Park. The arms shine with the radiation from recently formed blue stars and can be more clearly seen in infrared observations. By imaging flocculent spiral galaxies like M63, astronomers hope to gain a better understanding of how stars form in such systems.

This image was not part of my original imaging plan but circumstances required a redirect after some clouds interrupted southern imaging. However, though it was not part of the plan, I’m glad I decided to image this deep sky object. It’s been a couple years since I last imaged this beautiful galaxy and I shocked to find that after only 4 hours of total integration time, an incredible amount of IFN was revealed.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

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Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Basic success
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Astrometry.net job	5850603
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

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M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

M63 - The Sunflower Galaxy

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