Today's image in my Southern Summer/ Northern Winter image series highlighting some of the seasonal delights for astronomers is M64, commonly known as the "Black Eye" Galaxy.
Its a deep sky object, as its quite small in size but quite bright none the less. The so called "Black Eye" is caused by thick dust lanes of the spiral galaxy blocking some of the central star light. The darker thick dust lanes being on the closer side from our perspective.
It often reminds me of looking over a thick eye-wall of a hurricane.
The M64 is its number in the Messier Catalogue, a list of "fuzzy objects" compiled by Charles Messier in the 1700's that were known to be not comets.
So over the course of January, I'll be posting daily images some of these highlights of the night sky. Today's image was taken last night from New Mexico H06 on 0.5m Planewave, a 300 sec exposure with the Luminance filter.
Enjoy!
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