Michele Hernandez Bayliss, a passionate amateur astronomer based in Weybridge, Vermont, has recently made headlines with her breathtaking astrophotography of two prominent galaxies: the Whirlpool galaxy (M 51) and the Croc’s Eye galaxy (M94). She spent multiple nights at great personal cost and exertion into picking up these cosmic beauties. Through her extraordinary artistry, the majesty of the beautiful night sky jumped off the page.
With RGB and hydrogen-alpha (Ha) filters, Bayliss produced this gorgeous portrait of the Whirlpool galaxy. She spent a whopping 16 hours collecting data for our National Treasure. This meticulous process involved compiling various images to produce a colorful and detailed view of the spiral galaxy, which is embedded in the constellation Canes Venatici.
Bayliss’s dedication to astronomy is evident in her recent work with the Croc’s Eye galaxy. On the 20th and 21st she utilized a Takahashi TOA-130NFB Refractor. She recently installed a Stellarvue SVX140T-R telescope to photograph this celestial object. For M94, she spent approximately 20 hours collecting data through a cascade of luminance, red, green and blue (LRGB) filters. The Croc’s Eye galaxy, nearly 34 million light-years from Earth, needed extra-special processing to bring out the details.
“The tricky part about galaxies is the processing — for the Croc Eye, the challenge was that it was a lot smaller than I thought in my 990mm scope but I was able to crop in a bit,” Bayliss explained. So a second challenge was controlling the brightness of the galaxy’s core. The intricate details of the image only came into focus after high dynamic range (HDR) compression was applied. “It’s very bright in the core so I had to do a bit of HDR compression to bring out the core and do a careful job with the Synthetic Luminance I created from the LRGB,” she said.
For Bayliss, his path towards astrophotography started over years spent out under the night sky as a visual astronomer. Transformative experiences She has taken that excitement home, too — over the last two years, she has created a backyard observatory at her house. Today, she’s able to witness the cosmos like never before. Now, this investment in equipment and space has opened up her ability to capture the magnificence of deep-sky objects to a massive extent.
Her most recent images of Messier 94 and the Whirlpool galaxy exemplify her astounding technical mastery as well. They share her profound enthusiasm for astronomy. Even today, as an amateur astronomer, Bayliss is inspiring young scientists with the same tenacity that drove her to explore our universe.
