Leo’s Triplets

Most of the “star pictures” in the night sky look nothing like their namesakes. But one beautiful exception lunges across the southwestern sky on May evenings: Leo, the lion. It’s high in the sky at nightfall.
Leo consists of two patterns of stars that the brain puts together to make a lion. A backward question mark represents the head and mane. And a triangle of stars to the lower left forms the lion’s hindquarters and tail.
Leo is best known for its bright stars – particularly Regulus, its brilliant heart. But the constellation also contains quite a few bright galaxies. Leading the list are three galaxies that together form the Leo Triplet: M65, M66, and NGC 3628.
NGC 3628 is the most interesting of the three. Like our own Milky Way, it’s a spiral — a pinwheel that spans at least a hundred thousand light-years. We see it edge-on, so it looks like a streak of light with lanes of dark dust running down the middle.
Gravitational encounters with the other galaxies have really pumped up N