M64 - eye candy? (Tom Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Coma Berenices (Com) · Contains: Black Eye Galaxy · Black-eye galaxy · Evil Eye Galaxy · M 64 · NGC 4826

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M64 - eye candy?

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M64 - eye candy?

At the end of the first decent clear night in ages, I decided to turn my scope to a spring favourite, Messier 64 - a type 2 Seyfert galaxy, with its bright nucleus, but weak radio source, it lies 17m LY away and is 59,000 LY in diameter. It is inclined at 60 degrees to our line of sight, and is thought to consist of two distinct regions - a central core including the dust lanes, which give it it’s familiar moniker, and an outer, possibly counter-rotating diffuse region.

This image consists of just over an hour of luminance data, captured in Envisage, aligned and stacked in ASTAP, and processed in Startools. I was amazed by the level of detail and depth in the core and outer regions for so little integration and less than perfect seeing. Plenty of opportunity to add more data and some colour frames. I’m not suggesting it’s ‘eye candy’, and I certainly don’t fancy a black eye!

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4376172
PixInsight job	O6V91IJLU7VMZ2MYHNEWRAX7YIG9L3ZA
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	12h56m41s.495
RA (top/left)	12h57m28s.870
RA (top/right)	12h55m59s.160
RA (bottom/right)	12h55m54s.872
RA (bottom/left)	12h57m23s.931

Dec (center)	+21°40′30″.73
Dec (top/left)	+21°47′37″.20
Dec (top/right)	+21°48′54″.11
Dec (bottom/right)	+21°33′23″.34
Dec (bottom/left)	+21°32′06″.84

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M64 - eye candy?

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