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Leo Triplet


James

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It's been a bit of a drought for me for imaging (and most others in the south-west UK) so I've scraped together some data taken using a scope that's fallen off a mount (!) and needs a little tweak to the optics, two mounts (one that's proven somewhat recalcitrant), all over about three years with mixed weather conditions. The changing scopes/mounts etc is an occupational hazard I'm afraid but, whilst hard on imaging, it does allow for variety :).

The Leo Triplet is an old favourite from my visual-only days - I like the '3 for the price of one' object thing (yep, M81/M82/NGC3077 is another favourite). A group of three galaxies about 35 million light years away they make a good set of objects to observe and image. The image below shows the faintest of trails off the bottom of the galaxy on the left, NGC 3628, (aka the 'Hamburger' Galaxy - really!?). This is part of a 300,000 light year long tidal train of stars from the galaxy and this part is probably why I'm going to redo this image properly some time - I'd love to do an image properly showing this...

Due to the data being captured at different times and different circumstances I've had to crop a fair part of the image - I aligned to the little star in the middle every time but forgot to check the rotation of the camera.. every session was at a slightly different angle!

Equipment:

Mostly (!) Esprit 120, iOptron CEM60-EC, ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro through Astronomik DS RGB filters.

Scope control, capture and guiding by CloudMaker's apps - AstroTelescope, AstroImager, AstroGuider and processed in PixInsight, all on a Mac.

Lots of Pot Noodles, chocolate biscuits and tea.

All subs 120 seconds, mostly at Gain 75, Offset 30, -25c.  38x Luminance, 15x Red, 15x Green, 21x Blue

(click on the image for a better quality version).

LeoTriplet.thumb.jpg.2b66f3fc1693525a0452b8ef8f75ade8.jpg

 

Annotated for reference, North is to the left..

Triplet_annotated.thumb.jpg.4c7668e41a6c86fe22f3bf98ebb13993.jpg

 

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Fantastic image! Great detail in the galaxies! A small criticism from me is the background could do with a little noise reduction. In pixinsight, I would extract the Lum from the image as it is above and apply it as a mask inverted so the galaxies and stars are protected. Then run MLT with these settings and it gives the background and dark areas a more smooth look and hides my own processing mistakes lol. Its really subtle and you can apply multiple times to personal taste.

 

Still a great image as it is!

MLT.PNG

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