Leo triplet M66

[sgazer]

I fancied giving this a try last night, it was just getting to a reasonable height at about 10pm.

Mod'd and cooled Canon 300d

C80 ED+0.63FR (3 deg FOV).

16x5min subs

5x5min darks

needs some flats, will do today.

CG5-GT mount

Guided with a 120mm lens on a Mintron camera - not ideal but a lot lighter than guiding with my C8 SCT!

first one is the whole field

second one is cropped

Thanks for looking.

[MikeD]

Lots of nice detail in all three, great work.

Mike.

[sgazer]

thanks Mike.

[russ]

Great work and a very nice image. One of my fav objects' in the sky, you've done a great job pulling the detail.

Russ

[sgazer]

thank you Russ.

This one is with some flats taken which might be a bit better

[ncjunk]

I like the second or first image the best. That last image doesnt look

as good on my monitor. Nice images and i like the dust lanes ine the

2nd.

[sgazer]

yes, you could be right, I usually process them on my laptop which has funny contrast and colours which I can't adjust. Also after adding the flats I got a strange gradient across the image so processing that out had some other unwanted effects.

[barkis]

Yes I like No2 also,

Very nice Indeed sir.

[Psychobilly]

Very nice Russ

I think the last one just needs a little tweak to darken the background (black point) a bit... somewhere between 20 and 30 for the RGB values in the info dialog and then increase the canvas size by say 20 pixels of true black...helps fool the eye a bit...

Peter...