M66 is a barred spiral galaxy in Leo. This galaxy is one of the 3 galaxies making up the "Leo Triplet" of M65, M66, and NGC 3628. The high concentration of stars in the center of the galaxy may be a result of the gravational interaction with its two neighbors. This galaxy has apparent dimensions of 9' x 4'.

In this photo, North is to the Left. This image is cropped to 52% of the original full frame.

Exposure Details
Lens	Celestron C-8 SCT with Lumicon telecompressor
Focal Length	1100mm
Focal Ratio	f/5.5
Mount	Schaefer GEM - 7 1/2 Byers gear
Guiding	Unguided
Camera	Canon 350D - unmodified
Exposure	193 subexposures of 30 seconds each at ISO 1600 - a little over 1 1/2 hours
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	April 5, 2011
Temperature
SQM Reading
Seeing	3 of 5
Location	Pine Mountain Club, California
Software Used	Images Plus 4.0 for camera control, calibration, stacking, digital development, multiresolution sharpening, smoothing and noise reduction. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, color correction, selective color, high pass filter, star shrinking, saturation adjustments, and screen mask invert. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal. Carboni Tools for additional saturation adjustments, noise reduction, and smoothing. HLVG for additional color correction.
Notes	For this exposure, I was using my original Schaefer homemade drive corrector. This drive corrector had problems, as the slowest speed to which I could adjust was running slightly fast. Also, the slow button didn't work, so I was limited to 30 second subexposures before the drift in Right Ascension caused the stars to be too out of round.