A Trio of Galaxies (Ken Sablinsky)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Leo (Leo) · Contains: Leo Triplet · M 65 · M 66 · NGC 3623 · NGC 3627 · NGC 3628

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A Trio of Galaxies

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A Trio of Galaxies

The Leo Triplet, consisting of M65, M66, and NGC 3628. The 12" RC just barely fit this trio using a full format camera.

Continuing my practice with Pix, I tried a different calibration routine, foregoing bias frames in favor of dark flats. Optimizing the dark frames and using Bias frames were not reliably working to remove the background noise in some of my cameras, and I discovered online from others about CMOS chips and difficulties scaling darks for whatever reasons. The flat darks seemed to work well, and keeping "optimize dark frames" unchecked in Pix seemed to make everything match better.

I'm using a large LED tracing panel for flats, and it seems to work ok but I'm always left with some spurious gradients in the image. I'm not sure if it's the cheap LED panel, or some light pollution gradients. Anyway I worked hard at minimizing the gradient down towards the bottom right corner of the image, and got rid of most of it.

Please note: The following tables are updated every 24 hours.

Distribution of astrophotographers

This table shows the number of distinct astrophotographers who have been assigned and IOTD/TP award compared to the total number of images awarded.
	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
Top picks
Top pick nominations

Distribution of subject types

This table shows the distribution of awards per subject type, compared to the popularity of images of that subject type.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

Distribution of data sources

This table shows the distribution of awards per data source, compared to the popularity of images acquired from that data source.
	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

The “AstroBin Image of the Day and Top Picks”, or IOTD/TP, is a long-running system to promote beautiful, interesting, peculiar, or otherwise amazing astrophotographs, with a focus on technical excellence. Learn more.

Submitted The date and time when you submitted this image for IOTD/TP consideration.	...
Views by Submitters (available since September 19th, 2023) Every image is assigned to 50% of available Submitters. In the event that at least 80% of them don't view the image before its time in the IOTD/TP process expires, it's assigned to the other 50% of Submitters and the process begins anew.
Promotions by Submitters When 3 distinct Submitters promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for Top Pick status. This requirement, in addition to anonymization of images and distribution to only a subset of them, prevents biases and ensures that the best images are selected.
Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
Early dismissal Staff members have a lot of images to inspect on a daily basis, and they can dismiss images if they believe they don't meet the requirements for IOTD/TP selection. If an image is dismissed 5 times, it's removed from the process. This streamlines the process and ensures that any bias present in promotions could be overruled by other staff members.

Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4104723
PixInsight job	1EF2E564R7A2UUK9OEQKTV75Q1XCQ2VL
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	11h19m49s.749
RA (top/left)	11h18m38s.422
RA (top/right)	11h18m48s.473
RA (bottom/right)	11h21m00s.882
RA (bottom/left)	11h20m51s.250

Dec (center)	+13°16′05″.90
Dec (top/left)	+13°39′29″.56
Dec (top/right)	+12°51′05″.32
Dec (bottom/right)	+12°52′40″.45
Dec (bottom/left)	+13°41′06″.70

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A Trio of Galaxies

A Trio of Galaxies

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Contribution Index (beta):

A Trio of Galaxies

A Trio of Galaxies

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