M94 is a colorful spiral galaxy with an apparent diameter of about 11' x 9' (roughly 1/3 the apparent diameter of the Moon in the sky). Commonly referred to as "The Cat's Eye Galaxy", M94 is known as a "Starburst" galaxy due to the the bright bluish ring which indicates a period of rapid star formation. The different regions of M94 vary dramatically in brightness, from the very bright core, to the faint outer ring.

In this image, North is Up. This image is cropped to 63% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Lumicon telecompressor
Focal Length	1100mm
Focal Ratio	f/5.5
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2
Guiding	Unguided
Camera	Canon 20Da
Exposure	300 subexposures of 45 seconds each at ISO 1600 - a total of of 3 3/4 hours
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	May 4 and May 26, 2011
Temperature	57 on 5/4, 48 on 5/26
SQM Reading
Seeing	4 of 5 on 5/4, 2 of 5 on 5/26
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, and multiresolution smoothing Photoshop CS5 used for color correction, leels and curves, star shrinking, saturation adjustments, noise reduction, and high pass filter. HLVG for additional color correction, and Carboni Actions for additional saturation adjustments and noise reduction.
Notes	This is a beautiful galaxy, and I'm pretty pleased with my results on this one. Someday I'd like to add some H-alpha data to this image in order to further bring out details in the spiral arms.