A firm favourite galaxy of mine due to its high surface brightness, angular presentation and delightful flocculent structure, this image is captured from my home observatory in the south west of the UK over the last few weeks as we've enjoyed some Spring sunshine and clear nights. A real joy to be imaging from home. Steve offered some guidance mid-processing when I had goofed with the colour balance slightly. I am pleased with the widerfield image which shows the galaxy in context, hanging in space with room across the field for that "floating in space" feel which I was aiming for. This year's data has also been combined with earlier data at the scopes native F7, rescaled to match the smaller FOV; I was surprised to see that the resolution and sharpness of the data remained sufficiently sharp. I did not pursue the extended halo/tidal tails which were just about visible in the luminance data as pushing for its presence in the final image would not have been sympathetic to the relatively modest data.

Processing involved iterative work to remove some stubborn gradients across the frame - at the rear of my garden, set at a lower level within a cutting, there is a rail line and there were a couple of nights of overnight maintenance and stray light. The data benefited from a rich RGB data set of 4 hours each channel for the wider field at F5.6 and then I added a further 2 hours each channel to give a total of 6 hours each channel at F7 (though 4 hours rescaled from F5.6). The pixel scale at F5.6 is 1.4" and at F7 is 1.2".

Original image: F5.6 with the adjustable AFR IV; Lum 30 x 600s; each RGB 24 x 600s; Ha 6 x 1200s; 19 hours

Rev B: F7 with the TMB flattener; Lum 30 x 600s; each RGB 36 x 600s; Ha 6 x 1200s; 25 hours.

An excerpt from Wikipedia: "Messier 63 or M63, also known as NGC 5055 or the seldom-used Sunflower Galaxy,[6] is a spiral galaxy in the northern constellation of Canes Venatici with approximately 400 billion stars.[7] M63 was first discovered by the French astronomer Pierre Méchain, then later verified by his colleague Charles Messier on June 14, 1779.[6] The galaxy became listed as object 63 in the Messier Catalogue. In the mid-19th century, Anglo-Irish astronomer Lord Rosse identified spiral structures within the galaxy, making this one of the first galaxies in which such structure was identified.[8] The shape or morphology of this galaxy has a classification of SAbc,[5] indicating a spiral form with no central bar feature (SA) and moderate to loosely wound arms (bc). There is a general lack of large-scale continuous spiral structure in visible light, so it is considered a flocculent galaxy. However, when observed in the near infrared, a symmetric, two-arm structure is seen. Each arm wraps 150° around the galaxy and extends out to 13,000 light-years (4,000 parsecs) from the nucleus.[9] The distance to M63, based upon the luminosity-distance measurement is 29,300,000 light-years (8.99 megaparsecs).[4] The radial velocity relative to the Local Group yields an estimate of 15,200,000 light-years (4.65 megaparsecs).[5] Estimates based on the Tully-Fisher relation range over 16,000,000–34,000,000 light-years (5.0–10.3 megaparsecs). The tip of the red-giant branch technique gives a distance of 28,930,000 ± 950,000 light-years (8.87 ± 0.29 megaparsecs).[13] M63 is part of the M51 Group, a group of galaxies that also includes M51 (the 'Whirlpool Galaxy')."