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I shot luminance for this trio of galaxies in December and after two clear nights in January I managed to get RGB as well. Larger image can be found in my blog: https://www.evenfall.space/post/galactic-waltz Gear: SkyWatcher Esprit 100mm f/5.5 ASI1600MM-C EQ6 guided with ASI224MC TS Optics LRGB filters. L: 196x120s, R: 60x120s, G: 72x120s, B: 60x120s. Total integration time approx. 13 hours.

Hi! I've been imaging from my new spot at UC Berkeley. The astronomy department gave me keys to the roof for astro imaging purposes, and even though it's a heavily light-polluted spot, I'm very happy with the results! Over the past week, I've been able to get some decent (by my newbie standards) shots of the Horsehead & flame nebula, as well as the Leo Triplet. The Horsehead nebula is made with 4 minute subframes at ISO 800, for about 3 hours and 8 minutes of total exposure time. The Leo Triplet is also made of 4 minute subframes at ISO 800, for a total of 2 hours and 46 minutes. I've included some closeups of the individual galaxies from the triplet as well. I did some serious layer masks on these guys, but I'm not sure if that counts as cheating!! :'D Please let me know what ways you think of for me to improve, and what you think I should keep doing! I took these with a Nikon D3200, an 8" Orion Newtonian Astrograph on Orion Atlas mount. I use an Orion SSAG on a 50mm guide scope. I'm using a 2" Astronomik CLS filter as well. Thanks, and enjoy!!! Horsehead and Flame Nebula: Leo Triplet: M 66: NGC 3628: M 65: My imaging setup atop my favorite Astronomy department

Apart from the odd 20 minutes of low cloud, it was a very clear night last night. I could not resist the coming of the galaxy season. Here is my first attempt this season quick process. ZWO ASI183mm Pro camera. 20 x 120s Lum 12 x 120s RGB Processed in Pixinsight. Sequence Generator Pro. Thanks for looking Dave.

I wasn't going to share this, but what the heck. The winter of discontent continues, so i guess even this little data has to constitute an image these days. After what seemed like an age of night after night of clouds, we had a rare few hrs of clear skies one night last week. So i managed to grab a whopping 9 x 7 mins of the Horsehead Nebula before it disappeared behind the neighbor's house. I then needed something else to aim for, so i brought up the Leo Triplet Sequence in SGP and managed to nab about 2.75 hrs in total, before the clouds returned. It really, really needs double, if not triple this amount, so i wasn't really intending on processing this tbh. I was really just messing about in APP and PS testing several things out, so there was no proper workflow being adhered to. I took an Auto DDP stretch out of APP and quickly processed it in PS, without much care. I noticed it was lacking in colour, so i thought this would actually be a good candidate to try out some ArcSinh Colour-Preserving stretches, so i took another linear stack and used Mark Shelley's excellent PS method for doing the colour-preserving stretches. Lo and behold, i ended up with a stack that was very rich in colour, so much so in fact that the sky background had also mottled up pretty bad. So i used a mask to only apply the rich colours to the stars and galaxies of the original image, and it made a HUGE difference. It was only at this stage that i suddenly thought i might as well actually go ahead and make an image out of it. I really want to stretch it more, but it just can't take it. There's just not enough data, end of story. In fact i may have already stretched it too far as it is. The background is a tad lower than i would have liked as well, but it was needed to help suppress the noise. I've ran quite a bit of NR too, more than i'm usually comfortable with, and it's still noisy. I know what the answer to that is of course, more data! ? (not likely). I do quite like the colours though ? Feedback welcome. 24 x 420s (2.75 hrs) 80ED (x0.85), D5300, HEQ5-Pro, IDAS-D1. Resized to 66% to help hide some of the warts!

Just managed 6 x 300 Lum on this in twilight before M66 disappeared behind the trees. My first supernova , and a nice fresh one at that. Esprit 100/ATIK460/AZEQ6

Since the weather is what it is here, and galaxy season is on everywhere else, I have reprocessed data from February of the Leo Triplets, looking for the tidal trail in case I had missed it, but sorry, no trace of the trail. Obviously, I would need more than 1 hour data for that. Still, I think it is worth posting. Equipment: Explore Scientific ED127 on EQ8 mount. Canon 60Da (ISO 1600) 15 x 240" (= 1 hour total)

Second weekend session and im revisiting some of my early targets again M1 and the Lio trio about 3.5h or 10 min exposures iso800 but only about an hour on the horse. It also suffered from some high cloud last night so its a bit noisy but im realy chuffed with the improvements im seeing from my (much) earlier attempts, having a bit of an issue with color balancing the modded Cannon and CLS filter. However, it feels like its all coming together a bit better. Still have a way to go with processing but i can do that when its cloudy! Jupiter was just nudging above the neighbours house when i was packing up so had my first view of him of the year to round things off....nice evening

Hi, Took this photo of the Leo Triplet during march 2015. The main problem for me to photo in LRGB is the bad light poluttion that I have in my backyard. Photo information: Luminance 18 pics X 15 min. Total Luminance exposure: 270 min RGB: 7 pics for each color channel x 5 min per picture. Total color exposure: 105 min Telescore: Skywatcher P250 F/4.8. Camera: QSI583 Mount: ASA DDM60 (No Guiding) Filters: Astrodon Gen2 LRGB http://www.flickr.com/photos/101543943@N04/17222658636/ Thanks for watching Haim

A few more subs helped to get this image of the Leo Triplet looking a little better than it did before...just in time because the Leo Triplet is setting behind houses shortly after dark where I live. 39 x 30 second exposures at 6400 ISO taken on 13th and 17th May 2015 10 x Dark frames 11 x Flat frames 24 x Bias/offset frames (applied to flat frames only) Processed in Nebulosity and Photoshop

While waiting for the sky to clear here in Sweden and galaxy season to start I have been fiddling around with data from last season. The first one is M51 data from Ole Alexander Ødegård (aka Xplode) that I added to some wider star field data that I had. I like the feeling of space around the galaxy while there is some rather nice detail that allows a zoom in. Altogether 4 h of data, most of it from Ole's TS 12" Imaging Newtonean (f/4) with a modded Canon 6D. The other is my own Leo Triplet data, and only about 1 hour of it but I think it turned out rather ok (5" ES Apo with a Canon 60Da). Comments are always welcome of course Cheers

This is an addition to my post about an hour ago on my first light with Samyang 135mmED (and a Canon 70D) on the Leo area (with the triplets). There is a rather bright object trasversing the image from top to bottom over a period of 35 frames (=35 min). It was actually rather bright, about the same brightness as the triplets, but since it moved between each sub, it was diluted by the 27 other subs. I think it moved about 10° per hour (very approximate estimate), so it would get around the world in about 1.5 days or so. Here are two frames taken at 01.00 and 01.01 on 24 March. Object marked by arrow. These are 1 min exposures so the object is not as elongated as seen in the images, it could be circular. Maybe someone knows how to identify it????

Last night it finally cleared for a few hours so I could add 30 more subs (=2 hours) to my previous hour of these galaxies. Starting to look rather nice I think, at least for being DSLR. Acquisition details: ES 5" apo running at native f/7.5 on EQ8 with my trusted Canon 60Da at ISO 1600. Now totally 45 x 4 min = 3 hours. About 0°C in the air and SQM showing 21.3 (straight up but the triplets were rather close to the horizon so I had some gradient issues) Comments and suggestions most welcome as always. By the way, I have a question. On good nights, like last night, I get PHD2 guiding around 0.5" RSM for both RA and Dec (using a SW80/400 with QHY5-IImono firmly clamped on the scope). Is that good or bad? I have Dec backlash in the EQ8 (seems to create a problem now and then but probably not last night) and I have to admit that I have not bothered with PEC training.

I just read Rodd's thread about his fantastic 29 hour Leo Triplet image and the tips and comments he got. I particularly thought Olly's and Wim's processing suggestions sounded interesting and decided to have a go on my own very modest Leo Triplet data from a year ago (although I have a clear sky for once the moon is right now spoiling everything). I started the processing from scratch, and taking the advise from Rodd's thread I worked separately on the background (having masked everything relatively bright). As Wim suggested, I took down the saturation of the background to get rid of most of the blue-green mottle, so I could bring out some more faint stuff. This approach did a small wonder to my limited data and I think I even see a faint tidal tail. Clearly 1 hour of DSLR cannot compete with 29 hours of CCD, but I got inspired and will probably have a go at some other old galaxy data while I wait for the moon to go away. Here is my first processing from a year ago and what I came up with today. Taken with my 5" ES apo and Canon 60Da, 15 x 240 s at ISO 1600. Processed in PS CS5.

Well not strictly a first attempt but the first time I've really made a note of what I'm doing and also a had a new toy to play with (6" f5 newtonian) Leo triplet - largely as a test of my new scope. Skywatcher 150pds, Exos 2 (EQ5) unguided, Canon 500d, ISO 800, a single 60 second exposure (I've not got to grips with stacking yet!) Given there's no guiding, no processing, no stacking, it's a cheap mount and it was near to a full moon I'm not too disappointed with that. The next steps are to work out how to process multiple exosures properly and clean up the hot pixels from my camera, rebuild the mount to make it run more smoothly and most significantly piggy back my ST80 so I can use it for guiding.

The Leo Triplet - a target that I needed to image again as previous efforts haven't really done it justice. This is the most successful attempt so far, largely thanks to the ZWO ASI1600MC Pro camera and by giving it plenty of exposure with not too much gain making for a smoother background and bringing out dust lanes and other details in the galaxies. 014 x 090 second exposures at 161 Gain cooled to -20°C 081 x 090 second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -20°C 010 x 120 second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -20°C 016 x 180 second exposures at Unity Gain (139) cooled to -20°C Total integration time = three hours, 30 minutes and 30 seconds 149 x dark frames 116 x flat frames 200 x bias/offset frames Captured with APT Guided with PHD2 Processed in Nebulosity, Fitsworks, and Photoshop Equipment Telescope: Sky-Watcher Explorer-150PDS Mount: Skywatcher EQ5 Guide Scope: Orion 50mm Mini Guiding Camera: ZWO ASI120MC Imaging Cameera: ZWO ASI1600MC Pro Baader Mark-III MPCC Coma Corrector Light pollution filter

Despite all my weather apps predicting cloud the night was unexpectedly clear (ish) with just the glare of the Moon and some some patches of thin high cloud to contend with. I wasn't sure how much of the three galaxies would come out as very little was visible on the subs but I was pleasantly surprised. M65 (bottom right), M66 (bottom left), and NGC 3628 (top). 1 hour and 25 minutes total integration time 68 x 75 second exposures at 400 ISO 29 x dark frames 52 x flat frames 21 x bias/offset frames (subtracted from flat frames only) Captured with APT Guided with PHD2 Processed in Nebulosity, Maxim DL, and Photoshop Equipment: Sky-Watcher Explorer-150PDS Skywatcher EQ5 Mount Orion 50mm Mini Guide Scope ZWO ASI120 MC imaging and guiding camera Canon 700D DSLR

I hope you all have been able to take advantage of the last few clear, if a bit murky nights :-) I did, and after reminding myself how to use my equipment (by aligning on a random star I thought was Regulus and spending an hour switching on/off again LOLOL) ........I managed to get some "ok" images of the the Leo Triplet - an object I've always liked for its eerie looking galaxies, their foggy arms hiding some sinister alien civilization, plotting their course for the Milky Way...lol This is the first time I've imaged this object with my mono camera (ASI1600MM) I always thought mono imaging was going to be such a pain having to wait numerous nights before I got enough data - but it really piles up fast once you get going doesn't it!? Fantastic - 3.4hrs in two nights - smooth. Here's my contribution - no need to critique - I know they're pretty much poop compared to most I've seen on here - the skies weren't great, and its the best I could do LOL Details Object name Leo Triplet Object ID M65, M66 and NGC 3628 Date(s) 21 and 24 March, 2017 Telescope Altair 115mm Camera ASI1600MM Luminance 8x5 min / 30x2 min / 1.6 hrs Red 7x5 min / 35 min Green 6x5 min / 30 min Blue 8x5 min / 40 min Ha 0 Oiii 0 Sii 0 Total time 3.4 hours Frames 0 Processing PixInsight / fully calibrated lights / Levels / Curves / SCNR only Notes The skies were not outstanding on either night of imaging this object. I am surprised at how good it turned out considering this. There is an awful lot of vignetting on the luminance subs which was improved by reducing the exposure time from 300 to 120 seconds. Alignment of the mount was problematic each night – because I kept aligning on the wrong star! Really must remember that when looking for a 1.4 magnitude star you WILL know it when it appears in on the screen – brighter than anything else besides another <1.4 magnitude star! :-)

I was shooting away on the Leo Triplet with my ES 5" apo and Canon 60Da last night (first time in a month for the usual reason) when around midnight it struck me that I could ask my wife nicely if I could borrow her Canon 70D so I could test the Samyang 135ED f/2 that I recently bought. After some mild protest I had permission to put it side by side with the scope. I made no attempt to align the side by sides but I could see that I had the Leo Triplets within the frame. One problem was focusing. There were no star bright enough in the centre so I could use my usual way of focusing (10 x live view), so I had to focus in live view without magnification. I think I was just lucky there (possibly it could be better focused but I do not know). I set the ISO to 1600 (should work as it was around 0°C outside), full aperture (f/2.0) and 1 min exposures. I had not much hope for this long shot, particularly since clouds started moving in. I probably shot about 60 exposures and surprisingly 28 of these were unaffected by clouds. So I got totally 28 min of data. Here is the result. No sharpening or noise reduction applied - just curves and GradientXterminator in PS CS5. I have to say that this is an amazing lens - even at full aperture there is almost no tendency for odd star shapes. Of course, this was done with an APS-C camera, and I do not know what the corners would look like with a full frame DSLR. In 35 of the frames I caught a slow moving object transversing the image from top to bottom in 35 min, possibly the ISS. It can be seen as a very faint line in this image.