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My springtime project.......Messier 66 (NGC3627/ Arp16)

RobH

By RobH
in Imaging - Deep Sky

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RobH

RobH

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Messier 66 (NGC 3627) is an asymmetric spiral galaxy about 36 million light years away from us in the constellation of Leo.

It's one of the famous 'Leo Triplet' of galaxies, the others being M65 and NGC 3628. It has a diameter of about 95,000 light years.
With a visual brightness of magnitude 8.9,  it's 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.

I've resisted the temptaation to sharpen the image anymore as sharpening artifacts would begin to creep in, and I don't like them :smiley:

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.

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RobH

RobH

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Thanks for the kind words folks. I only seem to manage 3 or 4 images a year these days due to the fact Im a stickler for getting enough integration time, and with our weather, that can take a while :grin:

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RobH

RobH

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The 460 is a real photon Hoover, and a decent sized chip that you can still use 1.25 inch filters on. If I could afford a second, I'd have one!

Regarding the colour intensity, I did a few versions with very muted colour, but then I thought, what the heck, the colour is there so why not show it properly. The 6 hours of Ha have really sparkled up the reds, and I wanted to show the heavy H2 regions caused by the interaction with NGC 3628, which is why I added them at full opacity.

It's a very subjective thing, colour in astro images...how much to push it is a personal choice I think, and this galaxy looks lovely to me with vibrant colour. After all, with our eyes, these objects are grey, even with really big telescopes.

I used a combination of layers using the soft light and colour burn blending modes in photoshop, the vibrance setting to push the blues, and LAB colour mode for a final tweak, but then reduced the saturation on the reds, as by this time it was a bit much.

Thanks for the comments and the likes folks :-)

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ollypenrice

ollypenrice

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Oh man, this is utterly gorgeous. I love this galaxy. It might well be my absolute favourite, in fact, and it took a step forward when I saw it like this. We rarely see it in such resolution and never, to my knowledge, on SGL.

I've been consciously looking out for a Rob image for months and missed it when it came but Mr H never disappoints. Never.

APOD submission?

Olly

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