The Leo Triplet

[nandopg]

Hello fellows,
The Leo Triplet (also known as the M66 Group or Arp 317) is a small group of interacting galaxies, located about 35 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Leo. It consists of the large spiral galaxies NGC 3628 (left), M65 (top) and M66 (bottom right inclined).

The stack is as follows:
Luminance: 16x600sec bin 1x1
RGB: 10x600sec bin 1x1 for each channel
Pre and Post Processing in Pixinsight
Bias, Darks and Flats applied

Telescope: Sprit 120mm f/7

The full resolution image is here: http://www.astrobin.com/full/94675/0/

Thanks for looking,

Fernando

[PRejto]

That is a lovely image Fernando! Thanks for posting it.

Peter

[allan gould]

Really nice image Fernando with a lot of detail
The colour is very good as well.
Thanks for posting.
Allan

[atalas]

Nice work Fernando.

[marco]

Very good processing, great color balance and detail!
Cheers
Marco

[nandopg]

Thank you for your kind comment.


Thanks Allan, very kind words !!




Hi Marco, thanks for the comments and appreciation!
Are you in China ? Oh boy !!

Best Regards,
Fernando

[Shiraz]

:thumbsup: An excellent image Fernando.

[astronobob]

Stunning resolution Fernando :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

[strongmanmike]

Wow Fernando, beautiful framing, beautiful colour and beautiful details even the tidal tail is showing there.

For me, the only thing letting this image down and only juuust a tiny bit, is the aftermarket smoothing of the noise, what ever you did on this score has produced a kind of smooth but mottled background that looks "worked on" :question:...if you could fix this (and I am sure you can :thumbsup:) you would have a top class Leo Triplet right there :thumbsup: err :question:...it's already top class, so it would be reeeally top class :D

Mike

[Regulus]

Really nice photo Fernando

[gaa_ian]

One of my favorite clusters & one of the best and most detailed images of it I have seen to date. Oh ... to see this detail visually !

[nandopg]

Thank you guys for all the feedback, comments and suggestions.

Michael: I totally agree with your remark. What happened is that I had so much dust on the sensor of my camera that when I took the flats, due to the changing of of position of the telescope, the dust particles moved, so that the flat frame nor only did not cleanup the donuts, but created some other new ones. Then there was no way to fix this situation, unless being aggressive on de-noising. The same happened in another image of NGC 3628 I did in close-up. Because of this I had to take my camera to a clean room in my shop and open the sensor chamber for a full cleanup. Now the camera is perfect, but the object is already to low to restart imaging. Well, given all this, the result is reasonable, although could be better as you pointed out.

Regards to all my friends,

Fernando

[strongmanmike]

Hey don't get me wrong Fernando, it is a fine image regardless and given your issues you have described, you have done a great recovery job :thumbsup:

Mike

[nandopg]

Hi Michael,
Oh man please, I didn't get you wrong. I am actually grateful for your comments, really. Those are an indication that you have looked my image with the due attention, what, of course, makes me happy.

Michael, please, never refrain from comment on my images. The same for every fellow.

Best Regards,
Fernando