Inspired by the JWST's first image of Stephan's Quintet, I decided to try how much of this amazing cluster of galaxies I could tease out with my rather puny refractor from my city location in Munich. And luckily enough the neighbouring Deer Lick group with the foreground galaxy NGC7331 also fit well into my small-ish field of view.

Stephan's Quintet is the galaxy cluster on the right side of the image. The actual cluster consists of only four galaxies in the process of violently merging with each other, with the fifth (NGC7320), the bottom one in this image, being merely in the line of sight.  

The Deer Lick group is the cluster of galaxies surrounding the large foreground galaxy NGC7331 in the left half of the image, which is not associated with the cluster. The small galaxies comprising the Deer Lick group are sometimes also called the "fleas".


Just for the fun of it, here is a comparison of the Hubble Space Telescope image of Stephan's Quintet with mine. Obviously HST's resolution I much much higher, but on the other hand it hardly shows the tidal streams between the galaxies and especially towards the top of the image. This is a fact with almost all images taken with high-end professional telescopes - observation time on these is just too expensive and in extremely high demand. Tidal streams between galaxies, which require long exposure times, are therefore an area of astronomy where amateurs have contributed a huge amount in past years.

In the background of the whole image, a trace of IFN can be made out. IFN (=integrated flux nebula) consists of dust clouds surrounding our galaxy and are illuminated not by individual stars or star clusters like other nebulae, but reflect the entire light or shine of the Milky Way.

I took about 3h each of R, G and B exposures and 3.5h of luminance. For processing I combined all lights into a synthetic luminance and removed the stars for most of the processing. All processing was done in Pixinsight. To add more depth and bring out more of the background galaxies, I plan to take more RGB subs when time allows. But still, I am quite pleased with the result :-)

So here goes - I hope you like it!