Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn)  ·  Contains:  M 63  ·  NGC 5055  ·  Sunflower Galaxy
M63 Sunflower Galaxy, Joe Niemeyer
M63 Sunflower Galaxy
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M63 Sunflower Galaxy

M63 Sunflower Galaxy, Joe Niemeyer
M63 Sunflower Galaxy
Powered byPixInsight

M63 Sunflower Galaxy

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Description

This is my image of the Sunflower Galaxy, cataloged as M63 -- a challenging magnitude 9.3 deep sky object. And it didn't help that a couple of Elon Musk's satellites passed through my shots and ruined them. Anyway, the Sunflower Galaxy is categorized as a flocculent spiral galaxy due to its numerous discontinuous arms. It is about the same size as the Milky Way, contains about 400 billion stars, and is located over 29 million light years from Earth. M63 is enveloped by a huge dark matter halo whose gravity keeps the rapidly spinning outer arms from shredding away.

This image is a stack of forty 240-second ISO 3200 exposures at 2350mm focal length, calibrated with 10 dark frames, 20 bias frames, 20 flat frames, post-processed with StarNet++ and Photoshop.

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M63 Sunflower Galaxy, Joe Niemeyer