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: