Galaxy
Leo Triplet (M65)
In Leo (Leo) • Magnitude 10.3 • 10 arcminutes
Open the free AstroPlanner with Leo Triplet pre-selected, scored against your telescope, location, and the live cloud forecast.
One of the three Leo Triplet galaxies, an inclined spiral about 35 million light-years away showing beautiful dust lanes along its tilted disk. A Type Ia supernova in M65 in 2013 provided astronomers with a precisely calibrated "standard candle" to refine the cosmic distance scale.
Leo Triplet at a glance
| Catalog IDs | M65, N 3623 |
| Type | Galaxy |
| Constellation | Leo (Leo) |
| Right ascension | 11h 18m 54s |
| Declination | +13° 05' 60" |
| Apparent magnitude | 10.25 |
| Surface brightness | 12.8 mag/arcsec² |
| Angular size | 10.0 × 3.0 arcmin |
| Max altitude at 45°N | 58° |
| Best imaging months | Dec, Jan, Feb |
How to image Leo Triplet
Leo Triplet sits in the constellation Leo at right ascension 11h 18m 54s and declination +13° 05' 60". To frame and integrate it well, AstroPlanner will compute the optimal moonless window for tonight from your location, the field-of-view fit against your sensor and focal length, the suggested total integration time given your aperture and sky Bortle class, and a cloud-aware schedule that drops it from the plan if your nearest cloud forecast spike overlaps the best altitude window. As a galaxy, Leo Triplet needs the darkest skies you can find: surface brightness, not just apparent magnitude, drives whether it will lift out of the gradient.