This image shows a seldom captured group of galaxies that lies in the northern part of the constellation Boötes.  While none of the galaxies shown are especially large, and there are few resolvable details, there is a diversity of galaxy types in this small corner of the sky, making for an interesting show.

At visual magnitude 11.9, the lenticular NGC 5689 is the brightest of this grouping.  It is also the largest at an apparent size of 3.3’ x 1.0’.   Somewhat resembling a blurry image of the planet Saturn, NGC 5689 is a type S0-Aa  galaxy that has a couple of faint dust lanes and a bright nucleus.  The Hubble Space Telescope did a slightly better job of resolving the dust lanes than my 100 mm refractor could… no surprises there.

https://hubblesite.org/contents/media/images/1999/34/886-Image.html

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:NGC_5689_hst_07450_R814B450.png

Three additional galaxies in this image lie at about the same distance as NGC 5689, suggesting they are part of a small cluster.  Those galaxies are NGC 5682, NGC 5693, and NGC 5700. 

The little galaxy with the protruding arm near the center is NGC 5693, a type SAcd spiral of magnitude 13.6.

NGC 5683, the little ruddy spiral next to the larger, warped NGC 5682 at the upper right, is evidently a foreground object and not part of the cluster.   

At the lower left of the image is the very dim PGC 52263 glowing at a visual magnitude of 16.25.  Its surface brightness is so low that I wonder whether it is just sparsely populated with stars, or if perhaps it is obscured by some intervening dust.

At the lower left of PGC 52263 is the distant galaxy cluster Abell 1948, which appears as a collection of ruddy orange blotches.

This LRGB image is part 3 of a widefield galaxy project I started back in early March with the Esprit 100ED and QHY268M.  This particular region of the sky features enough NGC objects that I was able to extract four complete image projects out of one set of data.  The galaxies are small and widely spaced enough such that posting the full resolution version (> 400 MB file size) does not make sense.  Despite crummy seeing on two of the three nights, the little 100 mm refractor did surprisingly well in capturing fine details, with the help of 2x drizzle during stacking.  With fine-tuning of the back-focus and the acquisition of a new autofocuser within the past week, I am optimistic that next month’s galaxy images will be even sharper.