M64 Black Eye Galaxy
Posted: Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:03 pm
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
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 (13.59 MiB) Viewed 323 times