The Croc’s Eye galaxy is a spiral galaxy located in the constellation Canes Venatici. On summer nights in North America it can be found near the star Cor Caroli. M94 measures some 45,000 light years across on its outer ring making it about half the diameter of our own Milky Way galaxy.  Distance is estimated to be some 16 million light years away with an apparent size of 11 x 9 minutes of arc.

This image was made with a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikon 400mm f/4.5 lens with a 1.4x teleconverter for a 560mm f/6.3 combination. The final image is a stack of 113 40-second exposures at ISO 3200 for a total of 75 minutes of accumulated exposure time. Star tracking was done with a Fornax Lightrack II. Images were aligned using Deep Sky Stacker followed by stacking, image stretching, and color correction with custom Python routines. Final image processing was done with Topaz Denoise AI and Capture One.