Leo Triplet without burnt out cores

[Carl]

Re proccessed a couple of layers in photoshop and got rid of those pesky burnt out galaxy cores. Small file only, 260kb the original file has much smoother backgound and edges 86mb. Too big to post.

Regards
Carl

[ballaratdragons (Ken)]

Fantastic result Carl! Yes,better than the original.

There is now sooooo much more fine detail in the dust lanes!

[Carl]

Thanks Ken
As soon as i read your first comments i knew i had gone a little too far.
Cheers
Carl

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Carl,
the broad fan-like distribution of dust lanes at the end of the much shorter & broader of the two principal Luminous arms of M66, is well shown in your image. At very high contrast, one interpretation of the three-dimensional geometry of this broadened and "smeared-looking" Arm is that the arm itself has been lifted out of the principal plane of this galaxy, perhaps by forces that originated in a previous encounter with the nearby galaxy NGC 3628 (which is also a peculiar galaxy!!)

There are also other evidences for a previous encounter of M66 with NGC 3628 :
for instance there is an outermost very-very-faint arm-like feature (that could be a tidal arm) in M66, and there exists a bridge of HI (cold & neutral Atomic Hydrogen gas) between M66 and N3628.

Here is what M66 looks like, when imaged with a radio telescope at 21 cms, from The HI Nearby Galaxies Survey (Walter et al, 2008). This image shows only the cold neutral atomic gas found in the galaxy M66:



The strong broadening of one of the two gaseous arms, and its much more chaotic morphology, is strongly suggestive of the idea that M66 has been perturbed!!

cheers, madbadgalaxyman

[midnight (Darrin)]

Very nice work Carl!
Darrin...

[madbadgalaxyman (Robert)]

Continuing from my previous post, here are a couple of images, at high contrast, of the highly unusual dust distribution at the end of the unusual broadened spiral arm of M66 :






The hypothesis that this unusual spiral arm is somewhat non-planar is well-supported by its appearance in these images.

(The other principal spiral arm of M66 is essentially normal, with a narrow primary dust lane that follows the inside of the luminous part of this arm; as can be well reproduced by the density wave theory for the origin of spiral arms in galaxies)

Over the years, I have had about 10 different views as to the degree of peculiarity of the galaxy M66, but I now believe that it has been significantly perturbed!

While NGC 3628 is strongly suggested as being the perturber which has lead to the unusual appearance of M66, M66 is also a case in which the observed anomalies/peculiarities could be due to interaction with a small low-mass galaxy.

[Ross G]

Great photo Carl.


Ross.