James Webb Captures Stephan's Quintet (Anthony Fuller)

James Webb Captures Stephan's Quintet

Taken from NASA Gov's page:

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies, is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic film, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Today, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope reveals Stephan’s Quintet in a new light. This enormous mosaic is Webb’s largest image to date, covering about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter. It contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files.

The information from Webb provides new insights into how galactic interactions may have driven galaxy evolution in the early universe.With its powerful, infrared vision and extremely high spatial resolution, Webb shows never-before-seen details in this galaxy group. Sparkling clusters of millions of young stars and starburst regions of fresh star birth grace the image. Sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars are being pulled from several of the galaxies due to gravitational interactions.

Most dramatically, Webb captures huge shock waves as one of the galaxies, NGC 7318B, smashes through the cluster.Together, the five galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet are also known as the Hickson Compact Group 92 (HCG 92). Although called a “quintet,” only four of the galaxies are truly close together and caught up in a cosmic dance.

The fifth and leftmost galaxy, called NGC 7320, is well in the foreground compared with the other four. NGC 7320 resides 40 million light-years from Earth, while the other four galaxies (NGC 7317, NGC 7318A, NGC 7318B, and NGC 7319) are about 290 million light-years away.

This is still fairly close in cosmic terms, compared with more distant galaxies billions of light-years away. Studying such relatively nearby galaxies like these helps scientists better understand structures seen in a much more distant universe.

James Webb Space Telescope Data

	Distinct awarded users	Total awarded images
Image of the day
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Top pick nominations

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Deep sky
Solar system
Extremely wide field
Star trails
Northern lights
Noctilucent clouds
Landscape

	Image of the day	Top pick	Top pick nominations	Total submitted
Backyard
Traveller
Own remote observatory
Amateur hosting facility
Public amaeteur data
Professional, scientific grade data
Mix of multiple sources
Other
Unknown

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	6006960
PixInsight job	4JIOUU1X7PMXGTRG8JNSL2P0MTASXSO8
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h35m59s.405
RA (top/left)	22h36m19s.459
RA (top/right)	22h36m05s.154
RA (bottom/right)	22h35m39s.315
RA (bottom/left)	22h35m53s.670

Dec (center)	+33°57′37″.85
Dec (top/left)	+33°56′15″.80
Dec (top/right)	+34°01′50″.94
Dec (bottom/right)	+33°58′59″.99
Dec (bottom/left)	+33°53′24″.58

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