Draco Triplet (Tom Gray)

Celestial hemisphere: Northern · Constellation: Draco (Dra) · Contains: NGC 5981 · NGC 5982 · NGC 5985

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Draco Triplet

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Draco Triplet

This image of the Draco triplet was something of a disappointment, having spent a whole night setting this up, I ended up with about 5 hours data, but lost half of this due to issues with tracking, or poor quality. Whilst the sky was dark and appeared transparent, seeing was moderate at best.

I intended to take this at f3, but liked the framing at f6, but struggled to optimise the backspace with my available adaptors. In addition my flat frames for RGB channels were poor, so I ended up just using the L flat to remove severe vignetting. Given the short RGB integration I struggled to get much, if any, colour saturation at all.

Clearly this trio would benefit from longer exposures under a dark sky. I will try again, but with the nights getting short it will be a struggle to achieve this year. Nevertheless my image shows the three main galaxies, along with numerous faint fuzzies.

Left to right NGC 5985 is a face on Seyfert spiral ~120 mLY away, 5982 an elliptical at ~130 mLY and 5981 an edge on spiral at 100 mLY. The dust lane in 5981 is visible, but longer exposures are required to show areas of blue star formation in the spiral arms of 5985.

Low-Cost Astrophotography
Schmidt-Cassegrain Telescope (SCT) Imagers
Altair Astro 183 M/C Hypercams
UK Astro-Imaging

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Status	Basic success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	4446355
PixInsight job	n/a
PixInsight queue size	n/a
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