Galaxy
Black Eye Galaxy (M64)
In Coma Berenices (Com) • Magnitude 8.5 • 10 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Black Eye Galaxy pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
A visually dramatic galaxy with a large dark dust lane in front of its bright nucleus — the "black eye" it is named for. Even more remarkable, the outer stars rotate in the opposite direction to the inner stars, a lasting scar from an ancient galaxy merger billions of years ago.
Black Eye Galaxy at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M64, N 4826 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Coma Berenices (Com) |
| Right ascension | 12h 56m 42s |
| Declination | +21° 40' 48" |
| Apparent magnitude | 8.52 |
| Surface brightness | 12.8 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 10.0 × 5.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 67° |
| Best imaging months | Dec, Jan, Feb |
How to image Black Eye Galaxy
Black Eye Galaxy sits in the constellation Coma Berenices at right ascension 12h 56m 42s and declination +21° 40' 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, Black Eye Galaxy needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.