The Sunflower Galaxy
While I wait for clear skies to finish my own ongoing projects, I am processing here the wonderful Sunflower Galaxy, Messier 63, which is part of the M51 group, and at about 30 million light-years from us is about the size of our own Milky Way Galaxy.
M63 is a flocculent spiral galaxy, as the visible spiral arms are patchy, rather than continuous. However, in the Spitzer infrared
image the spiral arms are clearly visible. M63 is also an active galaxy with a LINER (low-ionization nuclear emission-line region) and gives off both soft X-rays and Ha as well. This Insight dataset did not include Ha unfortunately. What the image does show very well is the extensive tidal tails associated with M 63, which is
thought to have been created as a result of interaction with a dwarf galaxy which had merged with M 63.
My processing
I registered and stacked all calibrated subs using DeepSkyStacker. I then applied background extraction, a luminance development stretch, HDR, initial color, and star reduction in StarTools. In Photoshop stars were removed using StarXterminator, the nebulosity layer was deblurred using APF-R (as used by NASA), denoised/sharpened with NoiseXterminator, with a final fine-tuning of the color space. The star layer was added back in with linear dodge (add).
Data
Insight Observatories ATEO-1 Telescope: Dreamscope 16" f/3.7 Astrograph
Mount: Software Bisque Paramount ME
Camera: FLI Proline 16803
Location: Beryl, Utah USA (Utah Desert Remote Observatories)
50 LRGB subs total 6 hours 30 minutes, using a mix of 5- and 10-minute exposures
Dates: 2019-04-01 to 2019-04-10
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