Messier 63, the Sunflower Galaxy, is not an unknown object by any means. A simple search will pull up many images of this wonderful object all over the internet. But there is more than meets the eye...
I was inspired to take advantage of the dark skies my telescope resides under by an image taken by Fabian Neyer back in 2019/2020 where he revealed the ultra faint galactic cloud that surrounds the seemingly straightforward galaxy.
See Fabian's image here:
http://www.starpointing.com/ccd/m63.htmlThis image pushed me to the brink of my processing skills. I had to consult with several other folks to employ some new techniques in PixInsight and Lightroom in order to be able to bring out the faint outer cloud but also keep the background and M63 core properly intact. In total, I ended up processing the luminance 4 different times before landing on a version that I was happy with.
Total data acquisition spanned 18 nights from Jan-April 2023.
Below is a stretched version of the inverted luminance that better shows the extent of the outer cloud
All-in-all, I am quite satisfied with the final result. If I were to do this over again, I would have opted to go for 600" luminance subs to capture more faint signal and then HDR it with a stack of 300" luminance subs in order to preserve galactic core detail.
Hope you all enjoy.
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