Starting on Leo Triplet - and comet?

Hey Guys,

Was out last night and FINALLY managed a decent alignment, good balance (thanks to recent addition of a longer devtail for my scope) and managed to get 10min subs!!! Previous best without eggs was 1min max (yes, I'm blaming balance issues over skill elsewhere, or lack there of).

Any, here's 24min of the "Leo Triplet" (2x 10min and a 3min and 1min stack, with 3x 10min darks). Wanted to capture more but ran out of time, and clear skies.

Used my CLS clip in filter so there's a green hue across the board, tried to remove it but feel I need more subs before I can get much better.

Also, spotted something in the lower left of frame, thought maybe it is Comet NEOWISE C2014 C3 ... however that's another good 15 degrees away right. So wondering do I actually have a comet (my first imaged) or just a blemmish?

Stacked image:

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That would be about the right place for the galaxy NGC 3593.
You could submit the image to astrometry.net on Flickr and it will plate solve it for you.

Hey Steve,

Spot on, thanks!!! Long time, no threads. How's things over the tasman? I escaped the city over the long weekend, 3 hour drive away and had some darker skies. Unfortunately didn't/couldn't take my telescope but camera and tripod managed a nice grab of crux and the coalsack, which I've never seen before with my own eyes!

When trying to identify this guy, I initially was just using Stellarium and when that failed to show anything I then tried the Orion version. Neither showed anything. However I can search for ngc 3593 which it finds but just shows a cursor, and doing an overlay of my image its bang on!

So 4 galaxies in one pic? Cool. That's my personal best. Haha. Well try out the astrometry.net flickr page thanks for the tip!

Also after some advice with these subs. Do you think I should persevere with 10min subs, which seems to chew through camera batteries quicker or go for lots more 3-5min?

-Daniel

Update: just refreshed the captions on the main image (had a mistake swapping M65 and M66, whoops).

Also, forgot to mention, looking up the triplet in my Sky & Telescope Pocket Sky Atlas, NGC 3593 is right there! Silly me, rookie mistake.

Just going from the image you've posted, I'd go for more shorter subs rather than fewer long ones and also 10 or so matching darks. It also looks like you'd benefit from some flats to even up the sky and cancel out that dark blotch.
Good to see you're out there and doing it. It's been pretty slow couple of years for me on the astro front but I'm sure I can dig out something.

Steve.