Right Ascension	13 : 15.8 (h:m)
Declination	+42 : 02 (deg:m)
Distance	37000 (kly)
Visual Brightness	8.6 (mag)
Apparent Dimension	10x6 (arc min)

Discovered 1779 by Pierre Méchain.

M63 was the very first discovery of a Deep Sky object by Messier's friend, Pierre Méchain, who caught it up on June 14, 1779.

The Sunflower galaxy M63 is a spiral of type Sb or Sc, displaying a patchy spiral pattern which can be traced well to the periphery of its only 6 arc seconds small smooth-textured central region. Although 6 degrees south, it apparently forms a physical group with M51 and several smaller galaxies, the M51 group, which is about 37 million light years distant.

The visual appearance resembles the photo: The spiral arms show up as a grainy background, which brightens slowly from outward and then rapidly to the nuclear region, which is still grainy. Star forming regions can be traced all along the spiral arms on color photos.

Type I supernova 1971I occured on May 25, 1971, and reached mag 11.8.

Observing Reports for M63 (IAAC Netastrocatalog)

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Hartmut Frommert (spider@seds.org)
Christine Kronberg (smil@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)

Last Modification: 9 Dec 1999, 22:58 MET