Leo Triplet (Bruce Rohrlach)

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

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Leo Triplet

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Leo Triplet

Took advantage of the new moon last week (hence minimal moonlight) to image the Leo Triplet of interacting galaxies (Messier 65, Messier 66 and NGC 3628, the latter, on the left, is colloquially known as the 'Hamburger Galaxy') located around 35 million LY away in the constellation Leo.

I don't yet have the Blue channel data - so for now I decided to combine LRGR as LRGB. Consequently I screwed up my colour scheme and ended up with a black and white image when trying to de-saturate the coloured space between the galaxies due to lack of blue channel data. Nevertheless, making headway with learning a new astrophotography image processing program called Astropixel Processor - which seems to do a good job with creating models to strip out light pollution gradients in the sub-frames, and allows combination of different binned data (Bin 1x1 for Luminescence data and Bin 2x2 for Red and Green channel data). The Blue channel data is still to be collected on another night when the weather improves. So happy with the progress.

This image comprises 2 hours of Luminescence data (which is the full visible spectrum cast as mono-colour) and 40 minutes each of Red and Green data.

These 3 galaxies in Leo are caught in very long slow dance as they gravitationally interact with each other. With the right exposure length (not this image) it is possible to see a long streamer of many millions of stars that have been ripped out of the NGC 3628 galaxy by gravitational interaction with the adjacent galaxies Messier 65 or Messier 66, and forming what is known as a 'tidal tail' that extends for around 4 times the length of the galaxy itself.

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	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
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	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
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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.

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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.
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Promotions by Reviewers When 3 distinct Reviewers promote the image, it moves on to the next stage of the process: evaluation for IOTD status.
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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	2097287
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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