M95 - Barred Spiral Galaxy in Leo

Messier 95 (NGC 3351) is a barred spiral galaxy in the constellation Leo, located about 33 million light-years away. Discovered by Pierre Méchain in 1781 and added to Charles Messier’s catalog the same year, it belongs to the Leo I Group of galaxies. M95 spans about 75,000 light-years across and features a striking central star-forming ring within its bar, where intense bursts of new stars illuminate the galactic core.

This image was taken with Telescope Live’s SPA-2-CCD system in Spain, a 70 cm Officina Stellare RC telescope, with a total of 6 hours 40 minutes of LRGB integration.

The dataset presented considerable challenges:

- Severe dust donuts despite calibration

- Large inter-frame shifts resulting in stacking artifacts along the edges

- Prominent gradients across the background

- Color balancing difficulties, with the galaxy persistently skewing toward red in initial attempts

Through extensive gradient correction, careful masking, and repeated adjustments to curves and saturation, the data was ultimately brought under control. While not perfect, the final result presents M95’s bar, spiral arms, and bright nuclear ring in a way that captures much of the galaxy’s structure, and hopefully comes close to what others have achieved with better data.

Sources:

wikipedia.org

science.nasa.gov

chaoticnebula.com

astronomynow.com

www.messier-objects.com

deepskycorner.ch

Data credit: Telescope.Live