Leo’s Triplet (M66, M65, NGC3628 - LEO) - A 2 panel mosaic, or an unbalanced table with 3 legs (C8 EHD)
Logically, I wanted to bring the 2 panels of Leo’s Triplet into a mosaic … but there was a serious catch. Although
Leo’s Triplet Base was quite decent at 4h30,
Leo’s Triplet Peak, aka the "Hamburger" was seriously missing meat with only 2h30 on it. Degraded detail in the hamburger, and a huge difference in background noise and granularity, which caused difficulties in the mosaic matching algorithm. Although there was sufficient overlap between the panels, with 10-12 stars visually clearly matching, I struggled for several hours to try and convince the algorithm that these panels actually match together, but eventually it worked. The second struggle was to get the background evened out, with the hamburger-plate having lots of crumbs on the table, ie. lots of grainy artefacts in the noisy background
I think I managed to get this mosaic to a reasonable quality level, nice colours and a sufficient level of detail in the galaxies.
The
Leo Triplet (also known as the
M66 Group) is a small
group of galaxies about
35 millionlight-years away in the
constellationLeo. This galaxy group consists of the
spiral galaxiesM65,
M66, and
NGC 3628.
C8, UVIR, ASI2600MC, EQ6-R Pro
NGC3628 - 180s 50x = 2h30 - 20230301-02
M65, M66 - 180s 90x = 4h30 - 20230227-28
Happy to hear your thoughts …
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