Draco Triplet - NGC 5985/5982/5981 with a 3.6m telescope

[Avdhoeven]

A few months ago I was crawling through the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) data and found this very nice dataset of the Draco Triplet. I decided to download it for later use. 

Now I processed the data and this is the result of the processing. As far as I know this is the image of the Draco Triplet with the highest detail ever shown (at least I couldn't find any imagery with more resolution).

The imagery was taken with the 3.6m telescope. Five images per channel were used:

R: 5x200s

G: 5x200s 

B: 5x750s

Altogether that is 1.6 hours of exposure taken with the Megaprime cam.

Dataprocessing of this data is quite difficult because the camera consists of 36 CCD's that all have different behavior and gaps in between them. To get a good image all gradients have to be taken out which shows to be quite hard.

Draco Triplet - NGC 5985/5982/5981 by Andre van der Hoeven, on Flickr

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

That is stunning! Lovely image!

[pyrasanth]

That is a beautiful image but I can't but notice the star centoids are out of alignment on the left hand side but that would just be nit picking- what an amazing telescope but a bit big for my back garden!

[Avdhoeven]

That is a beautiful image but I can't but notice the star centoids are out of alignment on the left hand side but that would just be nit picking- what an amazing telescope but a bit big for my back garden!

I have no idea what is the reason for that. I noticed it also, and it's already like that in the original data.

[laudropb]

That really is a very special image. Thanks for posting.

[JamesF]

A beautiful image.  And every time I look at it I spot another galaxy

James