M66 march 2014 RHa100 G B MASTER closeup border title LAB

Messier 66 (NGC3627/ Arp16)

Messier 66 (NGC 3627) is an asymmetric spiral galaxy about 36 million light years away from us in the constellation of Leo. It is one of the famous 'Leo Triplet' of galaxies, the others being M65 and NGC 3628. Its diameter is about 95,000 light years.

It has a visual brightness of magnitude 8.9, making it fairly easy to spot in a small telescope.

I was surprised to find that I had managed to capture the tidal tails from my rather light polluted site. As they were only just above the sky background brightness, I needed quite a lot of integration time in order to stretch them and separate them from the background without the image becoming too noisy.

The tails were formed by a past interaction with NGC3628. In this image, I've added Hydrogen alpha data to the red channel at 100% opacity using ‘Lighten’ mode in photoshop in order to emphasise the strong regions of star formation, a process likely to have been set in motion by the past encounter.

Imaging details are;

Luminance - 80 x 480s

Red - 28 x 300s

Green - 29 x 260s

Blue - 28 x 300s

H alpha - 18 x 1200s

All subs binned 2 x 2

Total imaging time - 23 hours 42 minutes.

Telescope - 12 inch Ritchey Chretien @ F5.3

Camera - Atik 460 EXM

Baader filters.

Imaged over the course of the spring from Weymouth, Dorset, UK.