Galaxy season continues with a look at a trio of galaxies known as the Leo Triplet. A long integration and the dark skies of the Methow Valley allowed me to capture the subtle interactions of this galactic dance. From the “hamburger” galaxy (NGC 3628) you are able to see a stream of stars and gas hanging like a weasel’s tail in space as a result of gravitational interactions with the members of this group.
The group is roughly 35 million light-years away. When that light left these galaxies, the Earth was in the late Eocene epoch—long before humans existed, during a time of major evolutionary transitions.
The Members:
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M65 (NGC 3623) is an intermediate spiral that appears the least disturbed.
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M66 (NGC 3627) is the largest and brightest of the three. Because of its interactions, its spiral arms are strikingly asymmetrical and it has a high concentration of central mass.
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NGC 3628 (The Hamburger) is an edge-on beauty is famous for its 300,000 light-year long tidal tail I mentioned earlier. This tail is a literal “ghost” of stars stripped away during a close encounter with M66 about 800 million years ago.
The Trinity is officially cataloged as Arp 317 in Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies. Computer simulations suggest that M66 and NGC 3628 had an extremely close “brush” in the past. This interaction warped M66’s arms and pulled the massive tidal tail out of NGC 3628.
In Western spiritual thought the Holy Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) represent Source, Manifestation, and Vitality. And the Buddhist teaching of the “Triple Gem” (Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha) offers a path to truth that mirrors the Christian Trinity.
As I sat in the dark of the Methow Valley, watching these 35-million-year-old photons hit the sensor of my QHY268M camera, I realized that ‘three’ isn’t just a number—it’s the minimum requirement for a relationship. These galaxies aren’t just neighbors; they are a community, bound by the same invisible laws that govern our own lives. Three galaxies that shine; three jewels of the divine cosmos that remind us that even across the void, nothing exists in isolation and they represent the spiritual essence of who and what we are.