M63 – The Sunflower Galaxy

The Sunflower Galaxy, M63, was the first object discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1779, and subsequently added to Charles Messier’s catalogue. This was later the first object where spiral arms were identified. This galaxy is part of the M51 group of galaxies.

This galaxy contains an unusually large volume of dust, and has very active star formation. It is classified as a flocculent spiral galaxy, with apparent patchy and discontinuous spiral arms, likely a consequence of the intense star formation.

Full field image is below.

Technical Card:

Mount: Celestron AVX

Camera(s): ZWO ASI 2600mc pro; ZWO ASI 120 mini guide camera

OTA: ZWO FF80

Guidescope: Williams Optics 50mm guidescope

Filters: None

Exposure: 119 Lights @ 180 seconds

Processing:

This was first light on my ZWO FF80, and I’m happy with the performance. The image is crisp, with well-focused and round stars from edge to edge.

This galaxy was a first run for a changed workflow for OSC galaxies. I used leaned heavily into the multiscale processing tools of PixInsight and I’m quite pleased with the results. I used Multiscale background extraction, Blur-X, Noise-X, and Star-X. Then I stretched with Multiscale stretch and used Multiscale Median for sharpening. I’m quite pleased the results.

Annotated image:

This is an amazingly galaxy dense region of the sky. There many PGC galaxies identified and many more that are not in PGC, likely several hundred.