Here we have my crack at the trio including NGC 3165, NGC 3166 and NGC 3169 located about 75 million light years away in Sextans. It appears that NGC 3169 and NGC 3166 are interacting based on the distorted appearance of the outer edges of the galaxies. It is thought that the two are separated by about 160,000 light years which is about the distance between the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud. They appear to all occupy the same envelope of neutral hydrogen.

According to my rough calculations based on the 4.2' width of the spiral NGC 3169 and the distance of 75mm light years, the diameter of the galaxy is about 90,000 ly.

NGC 3166 has a very compact core area and an extended envelope of stars, gas and dust and is also about 90,000 ly in diameter.

NGC 3165 is a smaller spiral also having the same red shift.

(information from Wikipedia entry and Kopernik.org)

This was one of those transitional kind of projects and is a hodge-podge of data acquired on several nights in March. I began using an ASI1600 with the C9.25 guided by a small guidescope. I got terrible results. I was dealing with bloated stars which drives me crazy, despite seemingly good guiding stats.

I decided the time was right to install my OAG that has been sitting on the shelf for about 6 months and I also received an ASI294mm. Getting the guider to work was simple as soon as I realized I had it installed backwards and could not figure out why I could not see any stars. But these dumb mistakes do contain an element of humor but only once the problem is solved. I hope nobody in the general area around my house heard the exclamations of frustration that came from my mouth when I had that OAG installed backwards, lol...

The difference between the ASI294 and the ASI1600 was readily apparent after the first images started coming in and the stars were much tighter. I was usually able to guide on about 4 stars and my guiding was, for me anyway, really great.

In the end, I used the data generated by the ASI1600 for Ha, green and blue and the ASI294 for the luminance and red channels. All this fiddling around resulted in my having to mash all this different data into an image and I had to crop it considerably from the original size (of the Luminance data) which is not the best thing but in the end, I think the story is good enough to tell and the image just barely good enough to post.

I hope you like it and Clear Skies to everyone!