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    Saturday, June 16, 2018

    Astronomy Adventure - Messier 65 And 66

    Messier 65 and 66 are two-thirds of the Leo triplet, a set of three galaxies in the constellation Leo. The third member of the trio is NGC 3628. Under truly dark skies, M65 and M66 are binocular objects but were a struggle for me to find with my 4.5 inch telescope in the heavily light-polluted Bortle 5 suburban skies I live with. All three of the galaxies lie around 35 million light years away and all three are gravitationally interacting with each other.

    In the below photo, I have circled the two galaxies with M66 below and M65 above:




    Funnily enough, these galaxies looked much better with my naked eye than what I was able to pull out with a 35 second exposure.

    And this is what the triplet looks like (although with sides reversed) with dark skies and multiple long-exposure photographs, courtesy of Giuseppe Donatiello and Nicola Di Lorenzo:


    Technical details on my photos:

    Scope: Starblast 4.5; tracking on
    Magnification: ~30x
    Camera: iPhone6 using NightCap Pro; ISO 8000; 
    Photo: 1x~35secs.



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