The Leo Triplet, also known as the M66 group, is a small group of galaxies located about 35 Million light years away in the Constellation Leo. The three prominent galaxies involved are M65 (bottom left) , M66 (top left) and NGC 3628 (right).

M65 was discovered by Charles Messier in 1780. It is an intermediate spiral along with some distortion which suggests some gravitational interactions with its neighbors at some point in the past.

M66 is classified as a SABb Spiral galaxy, which means that it has weak bar feature and loosely wound arms. It is about 31 million light years away and measures about 96 thousand light years across.

NGC 3628 is also known as The Hamburger Galaxy or Sarah's Galaxy. It was discovered by William Herschel in 1784. It sports a prominent dust lane and show signs of distortion from interactions with its neighbors.

This was my first image of the year. Rochester finally gave us a nice clear night on March 7th and I braved the cold capture to grab 58x180 second subs for a total integration that was just shy of 3 hours.

It was a super cold night - hoar frost built up on most surfaces but the gear did its job. I had a pair of heated gloved that my wife gave me - and they really worked to save my hands!

Here are the details for this image:

58 x 180 seconds, bin 1x1 @ -15C. (Total integration: 2.9 hours).

50 Bias exposures

25 Dark exposures

50 Flat Darks

25 Flats

Scope: William Optics 132mm FLT F/7 APO

Guide Scope: Sharpstar 61DPHII

Guide Scope Focus Motor: ZWO EAF

Camera: ZWO ASI294MC-Pro

Guide Camera: ZWO ASI290Mini

Main Scope Focus Motor: Pegasus Astro Focus Cube 2

Field Rotator: Pegasus Astro Falcon

Mount: Ioptron CEM60

Polar Alignment: Ioptron Ipolar integrated alignment cameras

Capture Software: PHD2 Guider, Sequence Generator Pro controller

Image Processing: Deepsky Stacker, Pixinsight, Photoshop, Coffee, extensive processing indecision and second guessing, and much swearing…..