Description (wikipedia)The
Black Eye Galaxy (also called
Sleeping Beauty Galaxy or
Evil Eye Galaxy and designated
Messier 64,
M64, or
NGC 4826) is a relatively isolated
[7]spiral galaxy 17 million
light-years away in the mildly northern
constellation of
Coma Berenices. It was discovered by
Edward Pigott in March 1779, and independently by
Johann Elert Bode in April of the same year, as well as by
Charles Messier the next year. A dark band of
absorbing dust partially in front of its bright nucleus gave rise to its nicknames of the "Black Eye", "Evil Eye", or "Sleeping Beauty" galaxy.
[10][11] M64 is well known among
amateur astronomers due to its form in small
telescopes and visibility across inhabited latitudes.This galaxy is inclined 60° to the
line-of-sight and has a
position angle of 112°.
[7] At the distance of this galaxy, it has a linear scale of 65 ly (20
pc) per arcsecond.
[7] The
morphological classification in the
De Vaucouleurs system is (R)SA(rs)ab,
[4] where the '(R)' indicates an outer ring-like structure, 'SA' denotes a non-barred spiral, '(rs)' means a transitional inner ring/spiral structure, and 'ab' says the spiral arms are fairly tightly wound.
[12] Ann et al. (2015) gave it a class of SABa,
[13] suggesting a weakly
barred spiral galaxy with tightly wound arms.The
interstellar medium of Messier 64 consists of two
counter-rotating disks that are approximately equal in mass.
[17] The inner disk contains the prominent
dust lanes of the galaxy. The stellar population of the galaxy exhibits no measurable counter-rotation.
[18] Possible formation scenarios include a merger with a gas-rich satellite galaxy in a retrograde orbit, or the continued accretion of
gas clouds from the
intergalactic medium.
[17][18] It has a diameter of 54,000 ly (17 kpc).
Personal NoteInspired by the beautiful pictures that Hubble has made of this Galaxy I gave it a try myself. I am happy with the details in the dustlanes. Less so with colors of the galaxy, that might be a bit more vivid. Bt you can only pump up the saturation so far...
Processing workflowPixinsight: WBPP, NormalizeScaleGradient, DBE, Syntethic Luminance with Lum+RGB, DynamicCrop, MLT denoise, HistogramTransformation, Starnet2, TGVDenoise, Game mask, LocalHistogramEqalization, MMT sharpening, Curves to boost the colors in the galaxies and on the stars
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