This is my third attempt at the Leo Triplet this year. The first one, from my Bortle 6 backyard, was a sorry failure. The second, from a dark sky site outside Milwaukee in Jefferson County, was more promising. For this third one, I used 26 x 300 seconds extra luminance data gathered at a dark sky site in Sauk County to attempt to pry out the tidal tail of NGC3628. You can just about see it here; at least four more hours of luminance data are probably needed to get it to stand out more prominently. In cloudy Wisconsin, that'll have to wait for a year.
Additional integration time as in my earlier image dated 4/28/2020:
https://astrob.in/ut69y8/Total integration time:
Luminance: 26 x 300 seconds (Bortle 2) + 18 x 300 seconds (Bortle 4)
Red: 12 x 300 seconds (Bortle 4)
Green: 12 x 300 seconds (Bortle 4)
Blue: 30 x 180 seconds (Bortle 6)
To combine the luminance subs from the two sites, I created a background subtracted reference image from the darker (Sauk County) site; then used Local Normalization to properly subtract out the gradients from the somewhat brighter Jefferson County site.
Comments