The crocodile's eye, M94

[timh]

Galaxy season seems to be full of eyes! The eye galaxies of Markarian's chain, the tiger's eye galaxy and the evil eye of M64. The crocodile's eye, M94 is a strange looking galaxy at only 15M ly that seems well worthy of its name. Something about it always draws me in for another look. This is about 2h of RGB taken with an OSC camera under semi-dark Bortle 6 skies supplemented with just under an hour of HA taken with a mono camera to highlight star forming HII areas.

A few spots of HA activity are evident even outside of the inner starburst ring. There is a very faint hint of the outer galaxy ring but I think that it would take much darker skies than my Bortle 6 (no moon but suburban lighting) to create enough contrast versus sky background to really show that convincingly? Just to calibrate colours, the brightest star in the field is a Magnitude 11.1 star B-V ~ 0.67 which should be yellow. The second brightest is at magnitude 13.26, B-V ~ 0.1 and so is approximately white.

PDS200 SW Newtonian, Baader flattener F 5.0, CEM70 mount with PHD2 guiding via a ZWO ASI 120MM camera and 50 mm/ f 160 mm guidescope.
Image scale ~ 1 arcsec/ pixel
ZWO ASI 294 MC PRO at -10C 171 x 40s exposures at gain 124 (~ unity)
ZWO ASI 294 MM PRO at -10C 14 x 3 min exposures at gain 124

40 frame Master darks and flats collected and created in SC. Lights captured in livestack filtered by brightness and FWHM over a couple of nights and in gaps between passing clouds.

TimH

[oopfan]

Nice work Tim! I wish I could do the same but my pixel scale at bin 1 is 2.3 arcsec/pixel. Not enough resolution I am afraid.

Brian

[Menno555]

Nice capture.
I can understand why it draws you, it has something ominous about it too

Menno