The Leo Triplet

The Leo Triplet (also known as the M66 Group) is a small group of galaxies roughly 35 million light-years away in the constellation Leo. The group consists of the spiral galaxies M65 (bottom right), M66 (bottom left), and NGC 3628 (top).

Imaged in late January/Early February.

Processed in mostly PixInsight with a few light finishing touches in PS
and LR. Imaged at Austerfield with the society Takahashi and my ZWO ASI1600MM-Pro.

139 x 30s Lum, 47 x 120s Red, 60 x 90s Green, 62 x 90s Blue

~ 5.5 hours total integration

50 darks, 20 flat darks and 20 flats per filter.

Getting to grips with PixInsight has been tricky, but I am really happy with the results and going forwards the workflow should be more streamlined. I had a few false starts and had to go back to be the beginning due to finding significant colour fringing around the stars late on in the processing, which was corrected by moving the R and G alignment by a few pixels, although it is still not perfect. I think that the problem stems from my camera and/or filters not being totally inline with the telescope. Pixinsight has especially done a great job of getting rid of the complex gradients that I had in the light subs.