Messier 94 "The Crocodile Eye Galaxy" (Jim Raskett)

Messier 94 "The Crocodile Eye Galaxy"

Messier 94 “ The Crocodile Eye Galaxy”

From Wikipedia:

Messier 94 (also known as NGC 4736, Cat's Eye Galaxy, Crocodile Eye Galaxy, or Croc's Eye Galaxy) is a spiral galaxy in the mid-northern constellation Canes Venatici. It was discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781, and catalogued by Charles Messier two days later. Although some references describe M94 as a barred spiral galaxy, the "bar" structure appears to be more oval-shaped.The galaxy has two ring structures.
M94 is classified as having a low ionization nuclear emission region (LINER) nucleus. LINERs in general are characterized by optical spectra that reveal that ionized gas is present but the gas is only weakly ionized (i.e. the atoms are missing relatively few electrons).

M94 has an inner ring with a diameter of 70 arcseconds (″) (given its distance, about 5,400 light-years (1,700 pc)) and an outer ring with a diameter of 600″ (about 45,000 light-years (14,000 pc)). These rings appear to form at resonance points in the disk of the galaxy. The inner ring is the site of strong star formation activity and is sometimes referred to as a starburst ring. This star formation is fueled by gas driven dynamically into the ring by the inner oval-shaped bar-like structure.

Hello All!

I just installed an oag on my Explore Scientific ED102 to help me get better guiding in poor seeing. Had a few challenges, but got it all working and it is working well!
After two moon-filled nights of testing the oag, I finally had a good night ahead and decided to try my new setup on M94.

M94 was an exciting target since I have never imaged it before. Also, it happens to follow a path in my backyard dodging many obstacles, which is really nice.
I managed two evenings on this target for a total of 13:45 of integration which is a good amount especially considering the sky quality. I didn’t feel that one evening wasn’t quite enough integration time for this target.

Guiding performance was very good and consistently in the 0.6 total rms error range.
The oag has been a very good update!

When I started processing the data, I realized that this will be a challenging target to process!

This is the first run through the data, which for me is usually somewhat of a ramshackle workflow, trying different things here and there, but most of the time it works!
No color adjustments besides SPCC, saturation, and SCNR and I learned some nice masking techniques while processing and that was a lot of fun.

I plan to do some more work on the stars. I think that a softer look might give the overall image a better appeal.

Thanks for looking and comments welcome!

Original
B
C
Final
D

B

Description: Added a little ET in PI to brighten things up. Stars still need some work.

Uploaded: ...

C

Description: A bit more work on the core.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: A bit of HDRMT in the core area in PI and a Highlights reduction in PS.
Results in a more detailed core area (as long as you don't zoom in!).

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	9655625
PixInsight job	20JR28XWKNJKNUUDRBKHS222YJRXQZ05
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h50m56s.22
RA (top/left)	12h47m56s.50
RA (top/right)	12h47m57s.15
RA (bottom/right)	12h53m52s.68
RA (bottom/left)	12h53m58s.86

Dec (center)	+41°07′19″.9
Dec (top/left)	+41°41′20″.3
Dec (top/right)	+40°33′29″.6
Dec (bottom/right)	+40°33′00″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°40′48″.2

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