Galaxy
Sunflower Galaxy (M63)
In Canes Venatici (CVn) • Magnitude 8.6 • 12 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Sunflower Galaxy pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
A flocculent spiral galaxy with many short, patchy arm segments giving it a ragged, sunflower-like texture — very different from the clean arms of a classic grand-design spiral. It was the first "new" object added to Messier's catalogue by his colleague Pierre Méchain, making it historically notable.
Sunflower Galaxy at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M63, N 5055 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Canes Venatici (CVn) |
| Right ascension | 13h 15m 47s |
| Declination | +42° 01' 48" |
| Apparent magnitude | 8.60 |
| Surface brightness | 13.1 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 12.0 × 7.5 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 87° |
| Best imaging months | Jan, Feb, Mar |
How to image Sunflower Galaxy
Sunflower Galaxy sits in the constellation Canes Venatici at right ascension 13h 15m 47s and declination +42° 01' 48". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a galaxy, Sunflower Galaxy needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.