M96 - Intermediate Double-Barred Spiral Galaxy in Leo

Messier 96 is classified as an SAB(rs)ab type galaxy, part of the Leo I (or M96) Group. What makes it particularly interesting is its asymmetrical structure: the dust lanes and gas are unevenly distributed, its core is slightly offset from the geometric centre, and its spiral arms lack strong coherence - all signs of gravitational interactions with neighbouring galaxies. The outer ring is either a ring or a one-arm spiral. And indeed, there is a compact elliptical (PGC83335) at the lower-right edge of the ring and it shows signs of interaction with M96. The ring and the central disk contain most of the dust and star-forming regions, and it is quite empty between them (you can easily see through it and find a handful of background galaxies). The galaxy is also the brightest member of its group, which includes other Messier objects such as M95 and M105.

Another great target captured with very little integration time (4 hours of LRGB) via the SPA-2-CCD system at Telescope Live. The Ha data was also gathered although only 12 min and showed no significant signal after continuum subtraction, so was excluded from the final result. The 600s sub-frames were all bin 2×2 while 120s ones were 1×1. This caused a lot of stacking artifacts. I ended up integrating each filter + binning combination in WBPP and then used APP to create final masters.

Sources:

en.wikipedia.org

science.nasa.gov

www.messier-objects.com

deepskycorner.ch

Data credit: Telescope.Live