M63 - the flowers are blooming (Tom Gray)

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

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M63 - the flowers are blooming

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M63 - the flowers are blooming

M63 has a fairly low surface brightness and benefits from longer exposures. I managed a 3 hour integration using 2m subs, which was all the sky conditions would allow - clear, dark but not transparent. Nevertheless pleased to get some detail in the core, clear flocculation, and perhaps a hint of the outer region - much longer exposures will be needed to capture the outer halo and long star streams that surround this celestial flower.

M63 is a flocculent galaxy, albeit boasts 2 spiral arms in near IR. Distance estimates vary, but it lies ~30m LY from earth and spans about 100,000LY (similar to our own Milky Way galaxy) - it is thought to contain ~400 billion stars!

This version is captured in Envisage, aligned and stacked in Nebulosity and processed in Startools. Some of my flats for 2x2 binned RGB frames were poor and I have accentuated the galaxy structure, and applied a little healing to remove unsightly artefacts in the background. I will try pre-processing in ASTAP to see if I get a better result, although usually at the cost of losing quite a few frames due to poorer quality or failure to align. As ever, comments and suggestions welcome.

Final
Original
B

B

Description: This mono version re-processed from scratch - taking the best 44 x 120s frames, aligned and combined in ASTAP and processed in Startools. Gentle HDR brighten, moderate sharpen and contrast to push back the noise. Apart from the obvious artefacts around the brighter stars (a fault of the Meade DSI and/or Envisage image capture program), I'm pleased with the extra detail and sharpness in the core of this spectacular galaxy.

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Low-Cost Astrophotography
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4379321
PixInsight job	MNS547K5MLJZQ2LTULEF0SZXB1WWL33Q
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h15m47s.201
RA (top/left)	13h16m45s.310
RA (top/right)	13h14m54s.268
RA (bottom/right)	13h14m49s.268
RA (bottom/left)	13h16m39s.911

Dec (center)	+42°01′52″.45
Dec (top/left)	+42°08′52″.75
Dec (top/right)	+42°10′10″.88
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°54′49″.93
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°53′31″.100

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M63 - the flowers are blooming

M63 - the flowers are blooming

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M63 - the flowers are blooming

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