Stephan’s Quintett

Observation Notes

To some object one has a strange emotional association. When I was at highschool I read an article in the astronomer's magazin (Sterne und Weltraum, the German analogue to sky and telescope) about someone hunting (visually) for Stephan's Quintett from a dark site in the Bavarian Alps (Sudelfeld). I was absolutely fascinated by this report and said to myself some day you do it yourself. ok, some 35-40 years later this my first attempt photographing SQ from my (not so dark) backyard.... This is probably the most difficult object I tried so far and certainly still plenty of room for fine tuning, but overall I like it, at least as a first try ...

Addendum after the first JWST data release:  like many others I was quite excited (to say the least) to see the fantastic JWST data. And like others here, I was motivated to have again a look at my data of Stephan's Quintett and to reprocess it (after gaining almst 1 year of experience). Considering that the seeing in my backyard is not quite as good as at L2, and considering that I have not (yet) spent some 10 G$ on astro gear, I think this is not bad ...

Technical Details

View the full-resolution image together with complete acquisition and processing details on AstroBin.