Leo Triplet, M65, M66, NGC 3628 (Doug Summers)

Leo Triplet, M65, M66, NGC 3628

The Leo Triplet is composed of M65, M66, and NGC 3628. Thirty five million light years distant and interacting to form warped disks, starbursting spiral arms, and a tidal tail of NGC 3628, the trio is quite a sight. M65 seems almost unaffected. Many other faint fuzzies are also in the field.

This view is the full frame of my f/2.2 RASA11 + ASI 183mc Pro OSC camera, except for a very slight edge clip. I found the trio to be more difficult to post-process than I had anticipated. Keeping M66's spiral arms prominent in the image wasn't too difficult, but retaining some of NGC 3628's tidal tail was a bit of a challenge. The galaxy cores are very bright in comparison to other faint detail; they required masking to beat them down a bit so that the overall field could appear more balanced.

Original
C
Final
D

C

Description: Touched up the post-processing to bring up the background just a bit for the tidal tail, and accentuated the dust in all galaxies slightly more.

Uploaded: ...

D

Description: SPCC, BXT, and GHS processing.

Uploaded: ...

The OSC Club (One Shot Camera)
Celestron RASA

Galaxies
Galaxy Groups / Clusters
Messier Objects
z-Chiricahua Astronomy Complex

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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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Status	Missing
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	n/a
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

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