28.9 ± 1.0 MLy

This is another target that was way overdue; my last attempt was 6 years ago, and was a pretty good image for me at the time. I continued to have problems with the session ending prematurely as the imaging camera downloads failed. I may have that fixed now (instead of using a USB3 hub and cable, I brought the USB3 cable from the imaging and guide cameras (the guider is plugged into the hub on the ASI1600MM-cool) to my USB2 hub that everything else is plugged into and then brought all the image data back on a single USB2 cable—so far, so good). But for this image I was still having problems. I’ve been curious about what appears to be a big dust lane visible in the outer part of M63, but surfing the web hasn’t told me much about it. Maybe it’s the result of a merger.

Date: 5, 10, 11 May 2019
Subject: M63, Sunflower Galaxy
Scope: AT8IN+High Point Scientific Coma Corrector
Filters: ZWO 31 mm diameter unmounted 7 nm L, R, G, B
Mount: EQ-6 (EQMOD 2.000j)+PEC
Guiding: Orion Thin Off-axis Guider + ASI120MM-mini +PHD 2.6.5dev6 (Win 10 ASCOM)
Camera: ASI1600MM-Cool, -20 °C, Gain 139 Offset 21
Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro 3.0.3.170
Exposure: 71x180 L, 20x180 R, 25x180 G, 17x180 B
Stacking: Deep Sky Stacker 4.1.1 (64-bit) dark+flat+bias, κ-σ stacking with κ = 1.5.
Processing: StarTools 1.4.341: Cropped, wiped, developed, HDR optimized, deconvoluted, and untrack denoised the L data. Combined RGB in StarTools, adjusting for different integration times, then cropped, wiped, developed, and used the color module on the RGB data, increasing the saturation. Untrack denoised. Combined L with RGB, performed deep space noise reduction, made a slight levels adjustment to darken, used layer masked “Increase star color,” used 1 round of “Make stars smaller.” AstroFrame.