The Draco Triplet is a group of galaxies in the constellation Draco. Although they are relatively easy to locate, they are challenging to image. Despite being physically large—comparable to or even larger than the Milky Way—their great distances away results in small apparent angular sizes, making detailed imaging difficult. 

The Spiral galaxy on the upper right is NGC 5985. It is located approximately 140 million light-years away with an estimated diameter of 237,000 light-years. In the middle is NGC 5982, an elliptical galaxy , some 130 million light years away. Its diameter is about 100,000 light years, similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. Finally, there is the edge-on spiral galaxy, NGC 5981. It is the closest of the three at 112 million light years.

This image was made with a Nikon Z7II and a Nikon 600mm f/6.3 lens. A total of 116 30 second images were taken at ISO3200 for a total exposure time of 58 minutes. Star tracking was done with a Fornax LighTack II. The raw images were converted to TIF using RawTherapee, which were then aligned using Deep Sky Stacker. The star aligned images were then stacked using sigma clipped averaging on program astro-sca. The stacked image was then stretched and color corrected using astro-color-stretch. Both astro-sca and astro-color-stretch are Python programs and are available here in the astrophotography software downloads page.  I hope to improve on this image in the near future with some better techniques and more imaging time.