M65 and M66 - The Odd Couple (David Payne)

M65 and M66 - The Odd Couple

Revision title: M65 & M66, Final final final

Alternate Title "A Tale of Two Galaxies" a la Dickens, or "The Two Leo Triplets" a la Snicket.
Both Leo Galaxies are Spiral, about the same projected size and brightness. However, the similarities end there. M65, upper right, is orderly, more or less monochromatic. M66 has a widely errant "atmosphere", and very distinguishable Hydrogen nebulosity regions (red), new star clusters (blue) and more well defined, but en-echelon dust lanes. Although M65 is viewed more edge on, I will have to do some reading to find out why we think these galaxies look so much different. Both glaxies are listed as 35 million l.y away. Small galaxies also abound in the image.
The third of the triplet of galaxies is NGC3628, shown elsewhere, appears edge on. The difference in all three has been attributed to their gravitational interactions.
This image was processed in Pixinsight, calibrated and stacked via the NSG script for normalization, and noise reduced using the Mure Denoise application. The lum channel underwent deconvolution and LHE. All channels were stretched and colour enhanced using the GHS script - this left a little colour artifact in few of the brightest stars that was left alone. A restretch of saturation would likely avoid this. ACDNR was applied to the image at the end.

Original
B
Final
C

B

Title: M65 and M66 - Should I change my style

Description: Help! I really would like your opinion - as I am thinking of changing my style of "finishing" my images. This revision has simply had the black-point adjusted and the stars brightened to allow for additional contrast within the galaxies and between the galaxies and the background. In addition saturation has been further stretched. As an image, this one I believe is the most impactful.
I do believe that the other one is, well, more honest - I have left the background lighter to be more honest with what's there - even if this is just noise. I also wanted to respect the fidelity of the data by staying away from the edges of the histogram. Is this just being silly?
Please leave a comment. If you don't like this revision I will revert to what I was doing before.

Uploaded: ...

C

Title: M65 & M66, Final final final

Description: A happy compromise? Some of the star flaws removed, & a little more star brightness at the high end (a little less definition right at the core), a background level compromise, but still showing M66 wild atmosphere. Thanks for the suggestions, I think I am happy now. I'll save the learnings for the next galaxy... tonight??

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5647411
PixInsight job	VR7HDIRBTFA557A605EU0R4N2KV11MLV
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	11h19m34s.930
RA (top/left)	11h21m00s.656
RA (top/right)	11h18m07s.217
RA (bottom/right)	11h18m09s.390
RA (bottom/left)	11h21m02s.531

Dec (center)	+13°02′06″.90
Dec (top/left)	+13°15′17″.66
Dec (top/right)	+13°14′28″.83
Dec (bottom/right)	+12°48′53″.38
Dec (bottom/left)	+12°49′41″.13

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