A Galaxy Suspended in IFN - NGC 7497 in Pegasus

NGC 7497 is a barred spiral galaxy (SB(s)d) located in Pegasus, discovered by William Herschel in 1784. It lies approximately 60 million light‑years away and spans about 4.4' by 1.7' -roughly 100,000 light-years across - making it comparable in size to our own Milky Way. What makes this view particularly captivating is that the galaxy appears embedded within the Integrated Flux Nebula (IFN) - faint wisps of high-latitude galactic dust (specifically MBM 54) located only about 900 light-years away, lit collectively by the ambient glow of the Milky Way.

LRGB dataset with 6 hours of integration using the Takahashi FSQ-106 at Telescope Live’s Spanish site. The data suffered from severe vignetting, leading to uneven illumination across the field. Addressed these issues with extensive gradient removal and ultimately applied heavy cropping to retain only the clean, central portion of the frame. Despite these limitations, the final composition presents NGC 7497 nestled amid eerie, translucent filaments of integrated flux nebula - creating a hauntingly beautiful juxtaposition of a distant galaxy suspended within the foreground dust of our own galaxy.

Sources:

theskylive.com

deepskycorner.ch

Data Credit: Telescope.Live