M63 is a beautiful spiral galaxy with amazing details in the spiral arms. M63 is part of a group of galaxies dominated by M51, the Whirlpool Galaxy. For a real treat, zoom on the enlarged image to see dozens of small, faint galaxies, particularly to the south and east of the galaxy.

In this image, North is Up. This image is cropped to 76% 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	434 subexposures of 45 seconds each at ISO 1600 - total of almost 5 1/2 Hours
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	May 3rd and May 5th, 2011
Temperature	49F on 5/3, 55F on 5/5
SQM Reading
Seeing	4 of 5 on both nights
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking and digital development. Photoshop CS5 used for color correction, shadows and highlights, star shrinking, saturation adjustments, unsharp mask, screen mask invert, and high pass filter. Noise Ninja for noise reduction.
Notes	This is my longest exposure to date. M63 is such a beautiful galaxy, I'm glad I invested the time in it. I'll want to reimage this target once I have all my equipment issues resolved, as I think there's a whole lot more potential. I may reprocess this one, as I think I can improve on this now that I have a little better understanding of image processing.