M66-Group, aka. Leo-Triplet ... finally caught right before closure time (Björn)

M66-Group, aka. Leo-Triplet ... finally caught right before closure time

Revision title: Affinity Photo only version

I finally managed to capture the Leo Triplet, right before closure time. Closure time? Well, I'm located at about 49N and so nights become shorter and shorter and at some point of time there's even no astronomical darkness. Besides, when astronomical darkness sets in, the object is already past meridian and from meridian to the neighbors tree, it's just a bit more than two hours (please don't try to reconcile the units of measurement here

).

I had started imaging this group already last year with a slightly different rig and I wasn't able to finish it for the very same reasons and the fact that weather didn't open a window to capture it. As you may notice, I'm combining data separated by about a month (not that the proper motion of the stars would have mattered) and I started to sweat already that I might miss getting all the data for a LRGB again. Fortunately, I could make it despite the fact that I had to expose the scope to pollen (yeah!

), which I try to avoid as much as possible.

As a final note to this image: I've processed it completely in PixInsight. That's a novelty for me as usually I do a good portion in PI and then go to Affinity Photo.

Clear skies and, as usual, feel free to comment!

Björn

Original
Final
B

B

Title: Affinity Photo only version

Description: This is an image which is fully processed in Affinity Photo. Only image calibration and integration was done in PixInsight to create the grayscale images for each channel. Any further processing (from color calibration, gradient removal, noise reduction, intensity transformation) was done in Affinity Photo.... I am quite pleased what I can achieve with this software.

Uploaded: ...

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	5745064
PixInsight job	JUAI7UK97HZJATNFW5PMPWP6HMG219KZ
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	11h19m45s.65
RA (top/left)	11h22m54s.25
RA (top/right)	11h16m40s.72
RA (bottom/right)	11h16m38s.55
RA (bottom/left)	11h22m49s.83

Dec (center)	+13°17′24″.4
Dec (top/left)	+13°52′48″.6
Dec (top/right)	+13°53′59″.2
Dec (bottom/right)	+12°41′50″.1
Dec (bottom/left)	+12°40′42″.8

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