Spacetime Pictures

🐦 Three galaxies. Pick a favourite.

Meet the Grus Triplet, three spiral galaxies locked in a slow gravitational embrace some 60 to 70 million light-years away, in the southern constellation of Grus, the Crane.

They're not just posing side by side, but pulling at each other, tugging out tidal tails and warping each other's arms in a dance that'll play out over hundreds of millions of years.

So, which one's yours?
1️⃣ NGC 7582, the big, dusty barred spiral with an active nucleus feeding a supermassive black hole
2️⃣ NGC 7590, the quiet, elegant one, its spiral arms neatly wound
3️⃣ NGC 7599, the stretched, disturbed edge-on, clearly feeling the pull

Drop your pick in the comments 👇

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💡 Tip: filter by object type (e.g. Galaxy cluster) to find your next deep-sky challenge 😉

🗓️ Today's processing challenge:
#️⃣ SP_0219
📖 The Grus Triplet
🌈 LRGB
🌎 Remote - Obstech El Sauce, Chile
🔭 Planewave CDK17 f6.5
⌛ 23h30m integration

Pass = unlimited master .fits to process 👉 spacetimepictures.com/datasets/SP_0219
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Original astronomical data and processing by Martin Pugh Astrophotography