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Deep Sky Galaxy

The Draco Triplet

The constellation Draco is well placed, high in the sky at this time of year and contains some little known objects including this group of galaxies, NGC 5985, NGC 5982 & NGC 5981 (from left to right in the image).

NGC 5985 is classified as a barred spiral, 5982 an elliptical and 5981 is an edge on barred spiral. All three are about 100 million light years away and the field of view in this image is 23.6 arc minutes square.

I’ve had these images on my PC since the beginning of April while I tried to resolve an issue with calibrating them. Thanks to Arnie at GRAS, this is now solved and was due to a buggy camera driver not subtracting the camera pedestal value from each pixel.

Telescope is GRAS-1 with an FLI 1024 DM camera and this image is composed of eight 3 minute exposures.

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