M65 (left) and M66 (right) are part of a trio of spiral galaxies in the constellation Leo, high in the spring sky. These galaxies are about 35 million light years away.

This was an experiment in imaging unbinned color frames. Normally color frames are binned 2x2 to reduce noice and collect more data. An unbinned luminance channel supplies the fine detail to the LRGB image. On this occasion, I tried to get high resolution in the color frames, to avoid having to expose the luminance frames. Sadly, the combination of an unbinned CCD chip and reduced light transmission through the color filters resulted in higher noise than I wanted. So several nights later I went after a couple hours of luminance exposure, for a greatly-improved image. In the future, I'll stick to 2x2 binning for the color.