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Leo Triplet (Messier 66) Astrophotgraphy

The Leo Triplet

The Leo Triplet is a small group of galaxies located approximately 35 million light-years away. The group (designated as the M66 group) consists of three galaxies. The galaxy in the upper center is NGC3628, also known as the Hamburger Galaxy. Lower left is M66 and bottom center is M65. 

This image was made with a Nikon Z7 II and a Nikon 600mm f/6.3 PF lens at f/6.3. It is a stack of 88 40-second exposures at ISO 3200 for a total of a little over 58 minutes of accumulated exposure time. Star tracking was with a Fornax Lightrack II. Images were aligned using Deep Sky Stacker followed by stacking, stretching, and color correction using routines written in Python. Final images were then noise reduced using Topaz Denoise AI with some additional minor final image adjustments using Capture One.