M64 - The Black Eye Galaxy (lowenthalm)

M64 - The Black Eye Galaxy

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

The rain and moon were finally gone in early April and M64 was in a good spot in my backyard sky nearing meridian, so I thought I would capture some images and see what I got. The seeing was pretty decent for several nights in a row, so I captured a a few more images each night before M64 started getting too close to my house (which dimly reflects the light of a street lamp) for a total an hours worth of data. I finally got around to stacking and processing the data yesterday. Lots of core detail showed up, along with the some blue star clusters intermixed with dust lanes forming the galaxy's signature dark eye. The subtle shading in the disk of this spiral galaxy is quite surprising to me as large spiral galaxies usually are close to us and don't look so uniform.

This galaxy is a fine visual observation target at 8.5 visual magnitude. In this image, I can trace the faint edges out to a dimension of 10.75 x 5.75 arc minutes. Given its distance between 14.5 and 18 million light years, that makes the galaxy between 45,000 and 58,000 light years in diameter. Its bright stellar core makes it yet another Seyfert galaxy, like M94 which I uploaded a few days ago.

My subs are usually 8 minute live-stacks, but in this case, I went with 6 minute images instead (10 of them, each a live-stack in SharpCap of 240 x 1.5 second exposures). Each night M64 was always getting close to the bad side of my backyard sky, so shorter exposures seemed the best option so I could squeeze as many images in each night before the light reflecting from the side of my house started flooding my optical tube.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: New version: Figured out how to get much sharper detail in the core and inner disk and improved noise management across the disk at the same time.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4484726
PixInsight job	K0GQOTTO4GDTYEJUPWYPHHY8RWETH3KV
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	12h56m44s.917
RA (top/left)	12h57m08s.374
RA (top/right)	12h55m33s.558
RA (bottom/right)	12h56m21s.541
RA (bottom/left)	12h57m56s.281

Dec (center)	+21°40′36″.63
Dec (top/left)	+21°56′16″.54
Dec (top/right)	+21°39′53″.96
Dec (bottom/right)	+21°24′55″.91
Dec (bottom/left)	+21°41′17″.41

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