Lost in the realm of galaxies

Here's M100 in Virgo. Lovely face-on spiral.

I'm off to search for something bigger and with a bit more colour (may have to turn the dome north!)

Butterfly galaxies

The central pair of galaxies are Arp 270 or ngc 3395-96 in Leo Minor, and off to the left (east) are ngc3430 and 3424.
Halton Arp (maverick astrophysicist) compiled a list of interacting galaxies which include tidal interactions between comparatively nearby galaxies and presumably very distant quasars. These distances are deduced from red shifts, and Arp questioned that the red shift was always an indicator of distance.
This small scale pic is from 4x4minute subs and rhe 350D was set for fairly small JPEGs instead of RAW.
(I have senior moments in the cold and dark!)

M3 with little neighbour

M3 in Canes Venatici.
Quite a good night (when I eventually got out - after a visit to the theatre)
This is 5x3minutes at 1600iso with auto dark removal (a 3min exposure takes 6 minutes)
Interesting to spot tiny ngc5263 to the west. This is about m13.5 I was pleased to capture this with 120mm aperture and not ideal location

What a shiner

M64 The Black Eye Galaxy.
A little tracking error but I blame that on the breezy night.
(Can't really use that excuse now. I've just viewed Pete R's view of the same object probably done at the same time. Brilliant [we could combine our two views to make a stereo pair])-joke!!
5x5min@800iso

Lulin - on the move

Hope this plays. It's a video fromthe 20 or so pics from Sat 28th Feb. 90sec exposures

Lulin

I had a little success with Comet Lulin over the last couple of nights. The pic shown was on Sat28th/Sun 1st and is a stack of 5x90sec exposures at 300mm f4.
I know that DSS can stack comet pictures but I must be doing something wrong. This was done in Registax 4 (I see that v5 beta is available).
Last night 1/2 March was a wonderfully clear night but I was plagued with hardware problems. My Canon TC-80N3 intelligent release was sticking. At times I was shooting off rapid fire 1/1000sec exposures and later I had no control at all. I fear it may be terminal!