Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night. (Dave Rust)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Canes Venatici (CVn) · Contains: M 63 · NGC 5055 · Sunflower Galaxy

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Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

Powered byPixInsight

Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

Acquisition type: Electronically-Assisted Astronomy (EAA, e.g. based on a live video feed)

The entire midwest of the USA is clear tonight...but there is a layer of haze that makes most stars disappear. It has been such a cloudy Spring! I was hoping for better. But my pollution filter cut through the crud well enough to give me a nice image.

Spring is here and the Sunflower Galaxy (M63) rises right on time, along with other celestial flowers.

This galaxy has such intertwined spirals that it's difficult to separate them. They wrap around a tightly defined center region. The densest material glows white hot in the very center and likely surrounds a supermassive black hole

The dark clouds define the outer spirals more than in many galaxies and I wonder what is the cause of all the brown non-glowing matter.

There are 400 billion stars in Sunflower. Even at a distance of 29 million light years, we can see blotches of bright magenta in the spirals where clouds of dense hydrogen are causing spontaneous formations of new stars.

The galaxy is not as vibrant as some. It turns slowly and radiates at lower energy levels. I'm told there is a smaller companion galaxy nearby that is distorting Sunflower's disk, but I'm unsure which object that is in my image.

M63 was first seen by Pierre Méchain in spring of 1779 during the first golden age of telescopes. Think about that...10 years before the French Revolution!

"I dreamed a dream in time gone by,
When hope was high and life, worth living."

Sorry, couldn't help it.

So I'll dream my own dream of the folks living on Sunflower Galaxy that I'll never meet, as I sip on a Cheerwine pop and listen to Guess I'll Hang Out My Tears to Dry by Keith Jarrett.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5715626
PixInsight job	E4O1TMSKXJ9ZNZPDNI1SFHCDLSCXB25P
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h15m49s.265
RA (top/left)	13h17m01s.248
RA (top/right)	13h14m34s.557
RA (bottom/right)	13h14m37s.120
RA (bottom/left)	13h17m03s.838

Dec (center)	+42°01′03″.91
Dec (top/left)	+42°11′13″.48
Dec (top/right)	+42°10′27″.70
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°50′52″.62
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°51′37″.53

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Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

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Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

Sunflower Galaxy M63 on a very hazy night.

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