Draco Trio; NGC5981, NGC5982 and NGC5985

This is a fascinating view of three totally different galaxies. From top to bottom there's a face-on spiral NGC5985, an elliptical NGC5982 and a edge-on NGC5981. And in the background there's dozens of faint galaxies.

While the group is far too small to be a galaxy cluster and has not been cataloged compact group, these galaxies all do lie roughly 100 million light-years from planet Earth. On close examination with spectrographs, the bright core of the striking face-on spiral NGC 5985 shows prominent emission in specific wavelengths of light, prompting astronomers to classify it as a Seyfert, a type of active galaxy.

NGC5985 has a size of 3*5.5 arcmin (mag 11.1), NGC5982 has a size of 2.6*1.9 arcmin (mag 11) and NGC5981 has a size of 0.3*2.8 arcmin (mag 13.89).

Exposure of this image is:
                                      L              =  14*1200"
                                      RGB         =    8*300" (bin2*2)
                                      TOTAL    = 6h 40min

Full size again on Astrobin