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 53% 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
Guiding	Unguided
Camera	Canon 350D - Unmodified
Exposure	216 subexposures of 30 seconds each at ISO 1600 - about 1 3/4 hours total
Calibration	30 darks, 30 flats, 30 bias
Date	April 4, 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, Lucy-Richardson deconvolution, noise reduction and smoothing. Photoshop CS5 used for levels and curves, noise reduction, saturation adjustments, and high pass filter. Gradient Xterminator for gradient removal, HLVG for color adjustment, Carboni actions for smoothing, and additional noise reduction.
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.