Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Leo (Leo)  ·  Contains:  IC 2745  ·  Leo Triplet  ·  M 65  ·  M 66  ·  NGC 3623  ·  NGC 3627  ·  NGC 3628
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M65, M66, NGC 3628: The "Leo Trio", LRGB, 14 Apr 2017, David Dearden
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M65, M66, NGC 3628: The "Leo Trio", LRGB, 14 Apr 2017

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M65, M66, NGC 3628: The "Leo Trio", LRGB, 14 Apr 2017, David Dearden
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M65, M66, NGC 3628: The "Leo Trio", LRGB, 14 Apr 2017

Equipment

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Acquisition details

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Description

Still a little more Moon than is good for this kind of image, but this was my last chance to image for a while and the weather was cooperating. Had some trouble finding good guide stars, and my guiding is the next area that needs a lot of work. I kept trying to set things up to get the maximum number of subs before this target set, but apparently I guessed wrong and I only got half as many R subs as I was shooting for before Leo disappeared behind the neighbor's trees. So I had to make do with what I've got. Perhaps as a result, it turned out to be difficult to bring out much color in this image. Still, it's a lot better than my last previous look at the Leo Trio.

Date: 14 Apr 2017

Subject: M65, M66, NGC 3628, The Leo Trio

Scope: AT8IN + High Point Scientific coma corrector

Filters: ZWO 31 mm diameter unmounted L, R, G, B

Mount: EQ-6 (EQMOD 2.000j)+PEC

Guiding: Orion Thin Off-axis Guider + DSI +PHD 2.6.3.2 (Win 10 ASCOM) using predictive PEC algorithm

Camera: ASI1600MM-Cool, -20 °C, Gain 0 Offset 10

Acquisition: Sequence Generator Pro 2.6.0.21

Exposure: 52x180 L, 8x180 R, 17x180 G, 17x180 B

Stacking: Neb 4.1.5, flats & darks, trans+rot align, Nebulosity 1.5σ stack and align.

Processing: StarTools 1.4.327. Aggressively stretched and deconvoluted the luminance. Combined RGB in Neb 4 and stretched, color balanced, and sharpened in StarTools. Used StarTools' "Repair" module to "repair" some stars that were out of round due to optical problems, but some of the "repaired" stars were probably really faint fuzzies that should not have been messed with. Layered luminance over RGB in Photoshop CC 2014, used Carboni’s Astronomy Tools deep space noise reduction several times, boosted the vibrance a lot and saturation almost as much (masking out some in the core of M66), topped off with AstroFrame.

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M65, M66, NGC 3628: The "Leo Trio", LRGB, 14 Apr 2017, David Dearden

In these public groups

ZWO ASI1600MM/QHY163M