A Sunflower in a Sea of Shattered Stars

Image Description and Details :

This image shows the galaxy M63, also known as the Sunflower Galaxy.

What sets this galaxy apart from other spiral galaxies is its extensive halo and tidal stream. These streams often occur when a galaxy has a close encounter with a nearby satellite galaxy. The result is a big stream of remnants of the satellite galaxy.

The image was taken throughout February(13.02, 18.02, 20.02, 22.02, 01.03.) and early March, party out of my backyard, party from a dark site, both located near Freiburg in Germany.

The gear used was the following: Celestron RASA8, QHY183M, Skywatcher EQ6, TS-Optics LRGB filters. The exposures were mainly 90sec at Gain 0, though some had 60s subs because of the moon. Total integration time amounts to 25hours.

Processing was mainly done in PixInsight, although I also used Adobe Photoshop and AstroPixelProcessor. The main challenge was to bring out all the faint dust without "blowing up" the stars and details, PixInsights multiscale processing certainly helped a lot in making that possible.

Copyright: Julian Shroff