M66 - the end of the beginning (Tom Gray)

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

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M66 - the end of the beginning

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M66 - the end of the beginning

This is my last image from our recent clear run, or perhaps the first of the next...

M66 is familiar to us all, and I wanted to try and pull out a bit more detail at f10 (2000 mm). Disrupted by the other members of this famous trio, M65 and the edge on galaxy NGC 3628, the core shows the usual riot of chaotic dust lanes, pink hydrogen emissions, and blue star clouds.

Seeing and transparency were not as good, when I took this, and as a result, my guiding a bit off, and my stars wonky. I had to work hard to bring out the detail and suppress a few artifacts in the background. 120s exposures and shorter integration have also let this image down.

Nevertheless, I am fascinated by what we can see in this SABb galaxy at 35 mLY, the dense arms, heavy with nebulae and star formation around the core, even made it into the Arp's peculiar catalogue. The outer spiral arms which extend to around 100,000 LY are not fully visible in my short integration.

Messier Objects
UK Astro-Imaging
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5631417
PixInsight job	2SDBDNFWTTO26X3LI83CCYLP6XJ614RW
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	11h20m17s.428
RA (top/left)	11h21m06s.960
RA (top/right)	11h19m29s.214
RA (bottom/right)	11h19m28s.858
RA (bottom/left)	11h21m05s.551

Dec (center)	+13°00′13″.34
Dec (top/left)	+13°08′02″.50
Dec (top/right)	+13°08′12″.90
Dec (bottom/right)	+12°52′24″.97
Dec (bottom/left)	+12°52′15″.47

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M66 - the end of the beginning

M66 - the end of the beginning

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M66 - the end of the beginning

M66 - the end of the beginning

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