Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C (Colin McGill)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Pegasus (Peg) · Contains: NGC 7317 · NGC 7318 · NGC 7319 · NGC 7320 · Stephan's Quintet

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Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

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Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

The famous Stephan's Quintet - discovered in 1877 by Stephan from Marseille Observatory.

The group is interesting - the blue spiral galaxy NGC 7320 has a markedly different velocity to the other members of the group, and is almost certainly an unrelated foreground galaxy which just happens to be projected onto the same location on the sky. The tail running to the left from this galaxy is likely caused by an interaction with NGC 7320C, the barred spiral galaxy to left, with the main gropud. NGC 7320C interacted with the group in the last few hundred million years.

The fact that this tail existed caused several astronomers to say that NGC 7320 was part of the physical group and it was part of a dispute about the nature of redshift in early 1980s.

The spiral galaxy NGC 7318B, just to the right and down from NGC 7320 is a relative newcomer to the group. X-ray images of this region show a shockwave. The galaxy close by to NGC 7138B may be elliptical, or spiral - the arms may be related to tidal distortion of NGC 7318B.

Finally, the entire group has an extended halo - the extent of this was only realised in 1998 - this is clearly visible in the image and matches that shown in Moles, M.; Marquez, I.; Sulentic, J. W. (1998). "The observational status of Stephan's Quintet". Astronomy and Astrophysics 334: 473–481 where most of the information above is derived from - an interesting read!

I have provided both a full frame and a cropped image version - both are in Adobe RGB image space - I was having trouble converting from that to sRGB. You will need a colour managed browser to see the image properly (e.g. Chrome).

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	1019189
PixInsight job	4Y52BXLYN8TMAX53U240UV3R72OVBCBD
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	n/a

RA (center)	22h36m00s.612
RA (top/left)	22h36m31s.891
RA (top/right)	22h35m29s.628
RA (bottom/right)	22h35m29s.279
RA (bottom/left)	22h36m31s.639

Dec (center)	+33°58′21″.79
Dec (top/left)	+33°54′09″.28
Dec (top/right)	+33°54′03″.57
Dec (bottom/right)	+34°02′33″.88
Dec (bottom/left)	+34°02′39″.62

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Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

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Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

Stephan's Quintet: NGC 7317, 7318A/B, 7319, 7320 and 7320C

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