A few days ago we had our first clear moonless night in a while. Spring has moved on quite a way since I looked at M108 and M97 - the evenings are now much lighter (it doesn't get properly dark until 9.30pm BST) and Leo is giving way to Coma Berenices and Bootes. I had been hoping to image some more objects in Ursa Major but this constellation is pretty much over head and difficult to observe for an alt-az telescope so I started to look a bit lower in the sky at Canes Venatici (the hunting dogs). In its boundaries we have M63, a magnitude 8.6 spiral galaxy. I started observing it about 10pm using my NexStar SLT and began taking a number of 30s exposures at ISO3200.
My final image consists of only 27 such frames (13.5 minutes) combined together in DeepSkyStacker and edited in Photoshop (click on the image to see a larger version). I ended up having to throw quite a few frames away due to tracking issues and because quite a number of frames were spoilt by satellite trails. M63 is obvious just right and below centre. To get a better look at it I have cropped the original image (the main one is binned x2):-
It is possible to make out a number of tightly-wound spiral arms which are "knotty" in places due to the presence of HII regions. I have increased the colour saturation of the galaxy and there is some hint of the blue colour of the arms. Also notice how the galaxy arms are more widely spaced to the left of the centre of it.
Going back to the previous picture a couple other much fainter galaxies have been picked up in the image. One is just to the left of centre and the other is right over by the right-hand edge of the frame. The former is UGC 08365 and the latter is UGC 08313. These galaxies are magnitude 14.48 and 14.73, respectively.
All text and images © Duncan Hale-Sutton 2021
