M65 is a beautiful spiral galaxy in the constellation of Leo. It is one of 3 galaxies that make up the "Leo Triplet" of galaxies - the other two galaxies being M66 and NGC 3628. M65 is about 30 million light years away, and has a mass of about 200 billion suns. Be sure to click on the image for a better view of the the dust lanes typical of a spiral galaxy.

In this image, North is to the Left. This image is cropped to 35% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Celestron focal reducer
Focal Length	1160mm
Focal Ratio	f/5.8
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 inch Byers gear
Guiding	ONAG On-Axis Guider, Lodestar autoguider, PHD Guiding
Camera	Canon 450D - Gary Honis modified
Exposure	89 subexposures of 300 seconds each at ISO 1600 - about 7 1/2 hours total
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	March 10, 2013
Temperature	41F
SQM Reading	21.5 (Bortle 4)
Seeing	3 of 5
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 5.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, star shrinking, smoothing and noise reduction, advanced Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, and multiresolution sharpening. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, high pass filter, star shrinking, screen mask invert, lab color, saturation adjustments, selective color, vibrance, match color, and smart sharpen. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Carboni Tools for additional noise reduction, and smoothing. HLVG for additional color correction. Registar for aligning stacks and composites and for color channel alignment. Focus Magic for focus restoration.
Notes	I had imaged M65 as one of my first digital astrophotos back in April 2011. While the image was acceptable, I was very happy to have a chance to redo it with my better equipment and improved processing skills. As it happens, I'm very happy with this image, as I was able to capture some very good detail as well as some nice color with this newer image.