Description
Messier 64, the Black Eye Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy about 17 million light years away. A distinguishing dark band of dust in front of the bright galactic nucleus gave rise to its name.
English astronomer Edward Pigott discovered the Black Eye Galaxy in 1779 in the constellation Coma Berenices.
Messier 64 also has a very unusual internal motion – the gas in the galaxy’s outer regions rotates in the opposite direction from the gas and stars in its inner regions. This is somewhat like the Superman Galaxy Scientist believe that this is the result of a merger between the Black Eye Galaxy and a smaller satellite galaxy more than a billion years ago. Hubble Space Telescope images reveal that stars are actively forming in regions where the oppositely rotating gases collide.
Acquisition and Processing
Broadband LRGB imaging remains a serious challenge in Singapore. It takes almost too much effort to process images with so much light pollution and resulting color gradients. The color also doesn’t seem to reflect accurately the star color. I am sorely tempted to do monochrome next time!
I also had a strange outcome integrating images taken on different nights. Luminance images taken on the first day integrated fine. So did images taken on the second day. However, when I integrated the images from both days, I got an image with unexpected streaking in one direction. It was unexpected as I had not encountered it before. I’m guessing that it was due to different patterns of light pollution on the different days.