Galaxies in Constellation Leo

The Leo Triplet, or the M66 Group, is a group of interacting spiral galaxies located in the northern constellation leo. The group consists of the galaxies Messier65, Messier 66 and NGC 3628 also known as the Hamburger Galaxy. The Leo Triplet lies at an approximate distance of 35 million light years from Earth. This a beautiful group of galaxies in constellation Leo and these are bright galaxies which can be observed with a telescope ,Their galactic disks are tilted at different angles when seen from Earth. NGC 3628 appears edge-on, while M65 and M66 are inclined enough to reveal their spiral arm Here is our Luminance Stretch which shows lots of details in the galaxy!

There seems to be lot of details in the stack of the Leo triplet, what you see here is Black and white image because we used a camera that shoots in mono, it is also preferred to use mono cam to get the best results as it gives great control over your data

A very interesting detail in the NGC 3628 is that we can see the tidal stream if we stretch the data properly. It has an approximately 300,000 light-years long tidal tail What are tidal streams? Dwarf galaxies that come too close to larger galaxies suffer tidal disruption; the differential gravitational force between one side of the galaxy and the other serves to rip the stars from the dwarf galaxy so that they instead orbit the larger galaxy. This process produces "tidal streams" of stars, which can be found in the stellar halo of the Milky Way, as well as in halos of other galaxies. Tidal streams are very interesting subject and there are lot of astrophotography targets which show this feature very well, these streams can be bright to extremely faint eg NGC 5907 galaxy shows remarkable tidal stream which stretches very far, refer to my image

Here is gradients corrected image of this region which shows more details in this area , the sharpness on M66 and M65 is also very fine! All the Processing is done in CCD stack, Photoshop and Pixinsight the steps are below Here is the final color version the data is around

Combined RGB in CCD stack gave color correction APASS

Combination of Luminance on RGB

In PS Softlight layering technique for colors in PS

Hdr tonning

Deconvolution in PS

Local histogram transformation

Exponential transformation

Mask in PI unshapmask

Lab color adjustments in PS

More sharpening

Noise reduction

Selective colors

TGV noise reduction

Selective noise Reduction

Lasso

Curves

Shadows and highlights

Gabanys color enhancing technique

Selective colors

And lots of manual adjustments;))) 16"f3.7 dream scope astrograph 16803 CCD New Mexico 5x300sec Lum 5X300sec Red 5X300sec Green 5X300sec blue 1x1 Image credit copyright : Michael Petrakos Muir Evenden, Utkarsh Mishra WWW.insightobservatory.com team insightobservatory