M105 and Leo Neighbourhood.M105, NGC3384, NGC3389 and environs - Apr 2022
Planewave CDK 12.5 - AIS6200MM
A-P 1100 GTO AE, Antlia Pro LRGB filters
L (13 exposured 3 min, 0 gain 1x1, 20 exposures 1min, 100gain 2x2) & RGB 3 x 35x80s) = 3.3 hours int time + (yet unused Ha exposures) = 5 hours

Alternate Title "Planning for Serendipity"

This view of the galaxies of Leo started out as a planning mistake, resulting in planning of two targets in one night and no willingness to get up in the middle of the night to manually rotate a camera. This resulted in the "poor" framing and the camera oriented along the ecliptic.  Once the camera had a few frames, I thought maybe I could crop later,  but I really did to this.

Despite this, I think the blue of the two ecliptic galaxies (M105 and NGC 3384) is nicely offset by the pale red of the odd, spiral galaxy, NGC 3389 and by the bright yellow star on the LHS. In addition, this view of Leo also provides for great, endless galaxy hunting.

As it turns out, NGC 3384 was photo-bombed by an asteroid - that I noticed by both blinking my images (going through the individual images as a video) and by looking at my "rejected" high pixels from the image integration. Since the asteroid was forceably removed from the image, you will not see it here, so I included it as an add-on to this image.

(Of course, I stretched this image with the GHS script (including some colour enhancement) and there is a bit of a write-up on it in the May issue of SkyNews magazine and Mike & I are slated to go on the TAIC on May 29th.

For the second version of this image, I used GHS to increase the bottom end contrast more, and make the background dimmer.  One of the consequence of this is a slight horizontal smudge can be see below the core of NCG3384 - a bit of brightening caused by the pixels associated with asteroid that werent quite bright enough to be outright rejected.  I just found this interesting - 

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."