Croc’s Eye Galaxy (M94) in Canes Venatici

Messi­er 94 (M94, NGC 4736) is a nice spir­al galaxy situ­ated in con­stel­la­tion Canes Ven­at­ici, and one of the near­er bey­ond our Loc­al Group of Galaxies.

Spir­al galaxy M94 was clas­si­fied Sab because of its extremely bright inner region. This bright cir­cu­lar disk is sur­roun­ded by a ring of act­ive star-form­ing regions, traced by blue young star clusters in col­or images, which sharply sep­ar­ates it from a much less bright out­er ring of an older yel­low­ish stel­lar pop­u­la­tion. In the out­skirts, this region how­ever ends again in a ring with mod­er­ate star form­a­tion activ­ity, so that M94 is one of the rel­at­ively rare galax­ies in which two ‘waves’ of stel­lar form­a­tion can be observed. In very long expos­ures, a fur­ther very faint ring, about 15 arc minutes across, becomes visible.

The dis­tance of M94 is estim­ated to be about 16 mil­lion lightyears.

[descrip­tion from seds.org]