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M64

From THIS… (see single shot here: www.galactic-hunter.com/post/__m64 ) ➡ to THAT! 😱

This may be called the Black Eye Galaxy, but I’m the one with the black eye after processing that…

 

This is what happens when you’re too lazy to reframe your target when you know a bright star is just on the edge of your field of view, and also when you never bothered to buy the right adapter to attach an IR Cut filter 😂

 

This is M64, also called the Black Eye Galaxy or the Sleeping Beauty Galaxy. Captured from a Bortle 4 zone with a total of 4 hours of exposures using a One-Shot-Color camera and a refractor telescope. The full moon was up in the sky, but I decided to image this target anyway! It was difficult to process, and the moon gave me a terrible gradient of light pollution, but after a heavy crop the final image turned out okay for just 4 hours total.

 

The Black Eye Galaxy can be found 24 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. Not too far from M64 lie several other Messier galaxies, such as M85 and M100. Another Messier object, the globular cluster M53 is also very close to it.

 

Shot with the QHY600C and SVX130! Needless to say, I spent the next day figuring out this IR Cut filter issue and now it should be fine :D

More info and better quality: www.galactic-hunter.com/post/__m64

Instagram: galactic.hunter

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Uploaded on April 7, 2021