M64 Black Eye Galaxy

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menardre
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M64 Black Eye Galaxy

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First of all... the previous night the winch on my observatory roof failed in the open position (sounds like the same type of issue with UMD dome). I had to brute force the roof closed ... at 2:30AM. Not a lot of fun alone at 2 in the morning! I then bought a new winch and installed it. Back to operational.

I really like the Black Eye Galaxy. It has such interesting structure. I imaged it a few years ago but wanted to do a better job. Everything went smoothly last night. I used 11 inch SCT with ZWO ASI2600 OSC camera. SVX130 and ZWO ASI290 for autoguiding. Camara set to -20C and gain of 100.

SGP4 managed all of the equipment. I started imaging at 8:30PM although it was still too light. I finished around 2AM. I was able to acquire 140 images of 2 minutes and 50 flats of 0.15sec. I actually used 135 of the images. The first few were too bright and a couple had excessive eccentricity.

Processing with Pixisnight. Tried to use the HDR function to distinguish the dark areas from the bright, but it was too severe. So I mostly stuck to fairly basic processing techniques.

M64 is a spiral galaxy in Coma Berenices. It is classified as a type 2 Seyfert galaxy. It is also know as the Black Eye galaxy, the Sleeping Beauty galaxy, and the Evil Eye galaxy. It is about 17 million light years away. There is a dark band of absorbing dust in front of the nucleus which is the reason for the name Black Eye. The galaxy has a strange behavior -- gas in the outer regions rotate in the opposite direction as the gas in the inner regions.

Roger
M64 Master_DBEdiv_EzDN_PCC_ArcSinH_Curves_MLTsharp_Curvesblue_SR.jpg
M64 Master_DBEdiv_EzDN_PCC_ArcSinH_Curves_MLTsharp_Curvesblue_SR.jpg (13.59 MiB) Viewed 306 times
Roger M.
Celestron CPC1100 EDGE, Stellarvue 130T refractor dual mounted on iOptron CEM120 on permanent pier mounted in Observatory. Imaging camera ZWO ASI2600 OSC, guide camera Lodestar or ZWO ASI290MM.
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