This field shows the famous Leo triplet - three photogenic galaxies in Leo. If you think the composition is off, I recommend looking at this picture on a large monitor in a darkened room. Ready?

Alright, in the top we have NGC3628 (Arp 317), in the bottom right is M65 and in the bottom center is M66. Why the odd composition? Because the main goal was to capture the tidal tail of NGC3628. You can see a faint line of material going from the galaxy to the left and slowly curving up. That is real - not an artifact of my image - and it was caused by gravitational interactions with other galaxies in the past. The background is full of other galaxies that don't reveal too much detail at this resolution. But the background is relatively free of noise, so go ahead and zoom in if you fee like it.

Technical details:
Date: Feb 7, 2016
Time: 10:40 pm - 4:40 am
Camera: SBIG STF-8300M
CCD Temperature: -12 C
Optics: Televue 127is (native)
Filter: AstroDon L
Light frames: 38x8 min
Dark frames: 70
Flat frames: 50
Flat darks: 50
Binning: 1x1
Guiding: Orion SSAG @ Orion finder (~162 mm)
Mount: AP Mach 1
Dithering: Manual
Processing: Stacking and deconvolution in CCDStack, Curves, Levels in PSCS6.

Other notes:
A very uneventful night, which is what I expected from a Sunday night. I was very tired from the very beginning, so uneventful=fine. Only two things worth noting.
1. One of my nightmare scenarios is to hear a noise close by, shining my light on it, and only seeing a pitch black 'Gestalt', no features, no reflections, a creature that absorbs all light like a black hole. Well, just as I started taking images, I hear a noise, I shine my light at it, and my tired brain is in panic because the nightmare scenario is now real. Fortunately, this state of panic only lasted for a split second, before my brain parses and computes: skunk. Its size disadvantage ensured that my state of panic wouldn't last too long. With my light shining right at it, both of us are frozen, and it felt like by freezing our movements, both of us signaled to the other quot;Hey, if either of us fucks up, both of us will have a bad day.quot; The skunk eventually went away peacefully.
2. Jupiter, Mars, Saturn, Venus, and Mercury put on a nice show. It was the first time that they gave me the feeling that they were indeed much closer to us than all the other stuff I was seeing in the sky. And seeing Scorpio rise this early in the year was surprising too. By the time I had packed up, the summer triangle (Deneb, Vega, Altair) was up.