Messier 64 (NGC 4826), the Black Eye Galaxy, is a spiral galaxy in the constellation Coma Berenices. It has a prominent dark band of absorbing dust in front of the galaxy's bright nucleus, giving rise to its nicknames of the "Black Eye" or "Evil Eye" galaxy. The core of the galaxy with its black eye dust band can be made out with a large aperture telescope in dark skies.

This image is a stack of fifteen ten-minute exposures on the QHY247C with a gain/offset of 4000/255. The images were shot through the 11" Edge HD OTA on the CGE Pro. The low exposure count and warm summer temperatures resulted in a relatively noisy background that was processed out in PixInsight. RA guiding problems resulted in slightly horizontally ovoid stars that PixInsight was unable to clean up. Final processing to selectively merge sharpened and noise reduced layers and apply final saturation adjustments were done in Photoshop.

Image Center:	View full size annotated image.
Right Ascension:	12h 56m 41.928s (194° 10m 28.921s)
Declination:	+21° 41m 21.867s
Orientation:	Up is 180.8 degrees East of North.
Image Size:	28.797' x 19.122'	Pixel Scale:	0.288"

Principal objects in field: Black-eye galaxy, M 64, NGC 4826

All identified catalog objects: NGC 4826