Leo Triplet with Refractor and CMOS Camera

[bdlbug]

I have been following the discussions regards small pixel CMOS cameras and refractors for imaging galaxies, I decided to give it a go. I have a 106mm APO that I normally use with a 0.75X Reducer and F/F, however for this image I took that FR/FF off so I imaged at native 690mm, F6.5. The camera is ASI1600 with 3.8um square pixels.
The image is a center crop from the Full Frame - it is 5.7hrs of exposure made up of  2.7hrs LUM and 1hr each for RGB all using 120s subs.
I used AstroPixelProcessor to integrate the subs, Registar to register and combine RGB and Photoshop to stretch and used AstroFlatPro to remove gradients and Google Nik Collection, Define2 to noise reduce.

Imaged over the nights 28,29,30th March last week, I am quite happy with this image as the transparency was woeful, high cloud or pollution due to high pressure system perhaps, hence the gradients I battled with.
From Wikipedia : The Leo Triplet (also known as the M66 Group) is a small group of galaxies about 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. This galaxy group consists of the spiral galaxies M65, M66, and NGC 3628

Thanks for looking and glad to have your comments
Bryan

[FaDG]

Hi Bryan, 

good idea removing the FF to work at full focal length by cropping, I wanted to do it myself but starting from my APS-C Canon 600d, it would be applicabile only for smaller targets. 

In your case the stars are very Sharp until the corners of your crop. Nice pic! 

[peter shah]

great shot with lovely colour