M63 - Sunflower Galaxy (Chase Davidson)

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

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M63 - Sunflower Galaxy

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M63 - Sunflower Galaxy

Spent the last few weeks capturing the Sunflower Galaxy inbetween cloud coverage. I was fortunate enough to get RGB data in a few days and originally had an image produced but I held off until I could capture some luminance to really get the data to pop. Having some really bad water marks that flats cannot get out so having to crop it down a bit from the original image. Any advice on how to water marks out of the interior lenses of a tripplet, let me know.

Thanks NASA for the information:
The driving force behind star formation is particularly unclear for a type of galaxy called a flocculent spiral. Unlike grand-design spiral galaxies, flocculent spiral galaxies do not have well defined spiral arms. Instead, they appear to have many discontinuous arms.M63, also known as the Sunflower galaxy, is one such flocculent spiral galaxy. Although it only has two arms, many appear to be winding around its yellow core. The arms shine with the radiation from recently formed blue stars and can be more clearly seen in infrared observations. By imaging flocculent spiral galaxies like M63, astronomers hope to gain a better understanding of how stars form in such systems. The galaxy is located roughly 27 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. It has an apparent magnitude of 9.3 and appears as a faint patch of light in small telescopes. The best time to observe M63 is during May.

Light Polluted skies
Cloudy Nights
Texas Astronomy
Astro-tech AT130 EDT

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
PixInsight job	7X53XU1RA54BW5QBJU0NCQ5R810IYZH0
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	13h15m50s.10
RA (top/left)	13h18m47s.21
RA (top/right)	13h14m08s.13
RA (bottom/right)	13h12m53s.62
RA (bottom/left)	13h17m30s.44

Dec (center)	+42°01′41″.8
Dec (top/left)	+42°10′09″.9
Dec (top/right)	+42°29′55″.7
Dec (bottom/right)	+41°52′57″.5
Dec (bottom/left)	+41°33′23″.3

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