Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Leo (Leo)  ·  Contains:  M 65  ·  M 66  ·  NGC 3623  ·  NGC 3627  ·  NGC 3628
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M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB), Turix
M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB)
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M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB), Turix
M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB)
Powered byPixInsight

M66 Group / Leo Triplet (RGB)

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Description

Messier 66 Group / Leo Triplet

This image is very much a break from form for myself, imaging with a (very) small refractor and only around a tenth of my usual exposure time.

So, I guess I should start with brief story time as to why; back at the start of the year I moved up to using an OAG for my main rig this left me with an odd collection of spare parts that together formed what one might call a rig. A guide scope, planetary camera and star tracker certrainly make for an.... interesting combination for sure. The final piece of the puzzle was something to run the whole contraption. Now for my main rig I used a Raspberry Pi 4B with Astroberry, but getting hold of another one of those wasn't really happening! What I did have however was an old Raspberry Pi 2B sat in the drawer gathering dust on which, with a bit of coaxing, I was able to install Ubuntu and eventually get KStars/Ekos/Indi manually compiled and running. Oh and of course.... the ususal drama getting a WiFi adapter to work!

By all rights the rig is performing acceptably given the limitiations, I was honestly shocked I could get away with this image using only 2hrs of data unfiltered! I'm especially impressed with  the quality of the optics on the Evoguide 50ED given it is in effect a cheap doublet (certainly better than the 72ED I've used previously), enough so that I think I'm going to plan some purchases to turn this into a proper travel / second setup (Star Adventerer GTI and TBD new camera). The ASI 178MC  needs some wrangling and is by no means as clean as the 533MC on my other rig, especially since even calibrated subs have some fairly nasty banding in addition to the ususal limitations of shooting uncooled.

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