Draco Trio

NGC 5981, NGC 5982, and NGC 5985 — known together as the Draco Trio — form a striking triplet of galaxies in the northern constellation of Draco, appearing in a single field-of-view yet lying at different distances of roughly 100–140 million light-years. NGC 5981 is a faint, edge-on spiral galaxy; NGC 5982, at the center, is an elliptical E3 galaxy that shows shell structure likely caused by past merger activity; and NGC 5985 is a face-on spiral (SAB or SBb) with a bright core that has been classified as a Seyfert-type active nucleus. Although these galaxies appear close on the sky, they almost certainly do not form a dynamically bound compact group — their line-of-sight distances vary significantly, making this a visual association rather than a tightly gravitationally interacting system.

7 hours of LRGB data acquired with Telescope Live’s older SPA-2 CCD system.

Sources:

deepskycorner.ch

constellation-guide.com

space.com

wikipedia.org

Data credit: Telescope.Live