M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055) (John Hayes)

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

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M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

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M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

The light from M63 travels about 37 M-yrs before we can catch it. Discovered in 1779 by Pierre Mechain, it is among the first galaxies to be identified as a spiral nebula by Lord Rosse using a homemade 72" reflector in the 1840s.

Lorde Rosse would be totally amazed by the images that we can now record with a modern digital camera--even with a small aperture like my 14" telescope. Regardless, this was a hard flower to pick! After declaring victory over my new automation system, I went after M63 and everything that could go wrong did. I won't go into all the details but this one was a huge struggle that ate through two lunar cycles as I struggled to get everything working. My data ranged from some of the best I've ever taken to some of the worst so I had to toss out over 1/2 of the images that I gathered along the way. I had hoped to collect about 5 more hours of data before setting this image free, but persistent high thin clouds finally put a cap on my efforts as M63 sinks into the western sky. In keeping with all the hardware issues I ran into, the processing challenges never let up and this turned out to be the single hardest images I've processed to date. I must have taken 6 or 7 runs at this data starting from scratch to get the color calibration more or less "right" and even then I had to apply a bit more "artistic tweaking" than I'd like. Still, I think that it's probably close enough. Heck, if this were easy, it probably wouldn't be any fun! Maybe, I'll take another run at it next year to see if I can clean it up a little. C&C is always welcome so let me know what you think.

- John

Original
Final
B

Cloudy Nights

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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.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
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.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
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	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1102754
PixInsight job	5BKRNPSAD57OIZ7O15OKLPENTBKNS1GL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	13h15m48s.126
RA (top/left)	13h16m33s.130
RA (top/right)	13h14m36s.205
RA (bottom/right)	13h15m03s.489
RA (bottom/left)	13h16m59s.999

Dec (center)	+42°02′01″.23
Dec (top/left)	+42°15′21″.48
Dec (top/right)	+42°10′18″.93
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°48′40″.31
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°53′39″.98

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M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

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M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

M63 The Sunflower Galaxy (NGC 5055)

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