M63 from the suburbs (lowenthalm)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: M 63 · NGC 5055 · PGC 2189676 · PGC 2191787 · PGC 2193890 · PGC 2194083 · PGC 46093 · Sunflower Galaxy · TYC3024-1166-1 · TYC3024-814-1

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M63 from the suburbs

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Powered byPixInsight

M63 from the suburbs

Acquisition type: Lucky imaging

Now that there are breaks in the bad weather, I have gotten a chance to practice with my new 11" SCT. It takes about 2.3 times the integration time to match what I did with my 16" dob, so I have been capturing a lot more data. The SCT mount tracks better, so I lose fewer frames to tracking glitches, so that helps out capturing more data. Still, seeing varies can sometimes vary wildly for a few minutes at a time, so that still slows image acquisition down some.

M63 was a good target in the darkest region of my suburban sky. I experimented with a little Ha/Hb/OIII triband filter data I collected one night, which pumped up all those little HII regions nicely.

Amazing dust lanes throughout! It tried a couple of go-rounds at different color correcting techniques to maintain dust lane colors, and settled on an LRGB workflow as working the best for this image. (This was done by creating a luminance channel from the OSC RGB data).

This is lucky imaging using SharpCap. Each of the 37 nine minute images stacked for this final image were composed of 135 four second exposures.

Original
C
Final
D

C

Description: Adjusted noise and over-sharpening around center of galaxy. Conttrast improved to show halo better. Color adjusted a bit too to reduce overly red dust.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: Completely reprocessed now that I better understand how to process my SCT images. Correct red and other color casts, gritting noise in galaxy, star colors, etc, etc.

Uploaded: ...

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Galaxies - big!

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The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	7032219
PixInsight job	LRDQF908C6TOAJGI94004F4E96YUQ2W8
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h15m48s.372
RA (top/left)	13h17m13s.249
RA (top/right)	13h14m27s.278
RA (bottom/right)	13h14m23s.920
RA (bottom/left)	13h17m09s.300

Dec (center)	+42°01′49″.50
Dec (top/left)	+42°11′26″.55
Dec (top/right)	+42°12′30″.80
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°52′09″.93
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°51′06″.22

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M63 from the suburbs

M63 from the suburbs

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M63 from the suburbs

M63 from the suburbs

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