I've had Stephan's Quintet on my bucket list since my first forays into astrophotography, more than a decade ago, but wouldn't you know it, I finally got to it only after the release of the stunning image by the Webb Space Telescope, which selected this as one of its first targets! So one way to characterize my humble image (with thanks to my very clever spouse Loula for her inspired suggestion of this tongue-in-cheek title) is ...

It Ain't Webb But It is a Wonderful Life!

Astronomically-knowledgable fans of the kitschy but moving 1946 Xmas film know well that an image of the Quintet is used to depict angelic figures who take an interest in the life of the main character, George Bailey, who is down on his luck, and facing "his crucial night". For a fun take on that connection, it is hard to top this snippet from a 2001 ESA/Hubble webpage on the galaxy group: "In reality, these galaxies aren't so heavenly [...] Stephan's Quintet has been doing some devilish things. At least two of the galaxies have been involved in high-speed, hit-and-run accidents, which have ripped stars and gas from neighbouring galaxies and tossed them into space." 

The image is from just over 22 hours of integration, divided roughly equally between luminance and RGB colour, acquired over the course of nine nights in the last two weeks of August. The plate scale is about 0.62"/pixel (after downsampling by 75% from the full resolution), and the field of view is about 25' x 23'.

Amazing new star-reduction PixelMath expressions!

As I was processing this image, I happened across a new set of powerful star-reduction PixelMath expressions developed by @Bill Blanshan. I think these are nothing short of a breakthrough for this usually tricky and often tedious part of the image processing workflow! Blanshan goes through the thinking behind his expressions in this video, and @Adam Block gives an exceptionally clear explanation in this one. I used the first of the three versions of Blanshan's expressions (which is particularly intuitive and elegant) in the processing of this image, although some additional steps were necessary to deal with limitations in the ability of StarNet2 to distinguish some background galaxies from stars in this image, and in order to handle some "delicate" features and small stars in the galaxies themselves.