> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://macobservatory.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # M63: Nobody Asked the Dwarf - URL: https://macobservatory.com/m63-nobody-asked-the-dwarf/ - Published: 2026-10-05T14:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-05T13:59:59.000Z - Description: Over 18 hours of integration on M63, the Sunflower Galaxy in Canes Venatici, and a short story about a retired insurance adjuster who photographs the remains of a galaxy that got eaten. - Author: Andrew Burwell - Tags: Imaging There was once a little galaxy that nobody ever gave a name to. It weighed about a hundred million suns, which sounds like a lot until you are standing next to a galaxy with something like four hundred billion stars. The little galaxy wandered too close to the big one. The big one ate it. Nobody asked the dwarf. The big one was the Sunflower, which is about twenty-nine million light-years from here. A Frenchman named Pierre Méchain found it in 1779, and his friend Charles Messier checked on it that June and wrote it down as number sixty-three. Neither of them saw what was left of the dwarf. You can't blame them. They had eyeballs and brass. The eating had happened a few billion years before, and it was not quick. The Sunflower pulled the dwarf apart one wisp at a time, and the wisps went around and around it, and they are still going around it now: a great faint loop of stars that used to belong to somebody else. Here is a man named Lyle Dettweiler, a retired insurance adjuster from Terre Haute, Indiana. He spent eighteen hours and forty minutes of his remaining life collecting light from the Sunflower, light that had set out long before there were any people on Earth to catch it. Lyle had read that professional astronomers confirmed the loop in 2010 using, among other instruments, a telescope only about six inches across. He found this enormously encouraging. He also found it a little insulting, on behalf of everybody with a bigger telescope. When the loop finally showed up on his screen, faint as breath on a window, Lyle looked at it for a long time. It was his professional opinion that the dwarf had been inadequately insured. There had been no witnesses. There had been no claim filed. A hundred million suns had simply been absorbed into somebody else's portfolio, and the only record of it was this thin arc, which you could see only if you were patient and your sky was dark and you did not mind your wife reminding you that it was two in the morning. Nobody asked the dwarf. In the morning he showed her the picture. She put her glasses on and looked at it and said it was pretty. **Lyle said yes, it was. He said that was the thing nobody tells you about getting eaten: from far enough away, it looks exactly like a flower.** --- Capture Details AstroBin Top Pick Total Integration 18h 40m Captured Apr 1 to Apr 2, 2024 (2 nights) Integration per Filter Lum: 9h 40m (58 × 600″) Red: 3h (18 × 600″) Green: 3h (18 × 600″) Blue: 3h (18 × 600″) Equipment Telescope: Takahashi TOA-130NFB Camera: ZWO ASI6200MM Pro Mount: 10Micron GM1000 HPS Flattener: Takahashi 645 Flattener for TOA-130 (TKA31587S) Focuser: Pegasus Astro FocusCube2 Filter Wheel: ZWO EFW 7 x 2″ Power: Pegasus Astro Powerbox Advance Gen2 Flat Panel: DeepSkyDad Flap Panel (FP1) Filters Chroma Lum 50 mm, Chroma Red 50 mm, Chroma Green 50 mm, Chroma Blue 50 mm Software Aries Productions Astro Pixel Processor (APP), Pleiades Astrophoto PixInsight, Russell Croman Astrophotography BlurXTerminator, Russell Croman Astrophotography NoiseXTerminator, Russell Croman Astrophotography StarXTerminator Location DSP Remote Observatory: Animas, NM: Bortle 1 View the full-resolution image and technical details on [AstroBin](https://app.astrobin.com/i/h9lmyq?ref=macobservatory.com).