This is the Draco Triplet (and photobombers). Unsurprisingly, these galaxies are located in the constellation of Draco. For reasons that I can’t even begin to understand, when I see these three galaxies, the saying, “See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.” comes to my mind. I don’t know why but I can’t stop it from happening so I figured I should share the pain. 🙂

The middle galaxy is NGC 5982. It’s an elliptical galaxy about 130 million light years away. Elipticals are not especially interesting in an image. They are essentially just big balls of stars but this one has visible shells. When I first processed the image, I thought I was causing posterization artifacts because of the faintness of the subject near the edges but when I went to learn something about the galaxy, I found they were real. They don’t stand out but if you zoom in, you can see them.

The edge-on galaxy is NGC 5981, It’s an edge-on spiral galaxy. And the topmost galaxy is NGC 5985. It’s a face-on barred spiral galaxy. Both are roughly at the same distance as NGC 5982.

The field is full of small, distant galaxies. Of course, they appear small only because they are so distant. The are at least 300 million light years away.

This is 24h 30m of LRGB data. For all the technical details, see astrobin.