Astral Imaging at Dogwood Ridge Observatory

Latitude: 37°48'51.0" N"
Longitude:78°23'41.0"W
Scottsville, Virginia 24590
 

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NGC7331 - The Deer Lick Galaxy Group

Image Information

From SEDS.org "Discovered by William Herschel in 1784.

NGC 7331 is one of the brighter galaxies which is not included in Messier's catalog. It exposes a fine spiral structure despite its small inclination from the edge-on position. Several companions and background galaxies are visible even in our photo.

NGC 7331 was among the earliest recognized spiral galaxies, and listed by Lord Rosse in his list of 14 "spiral or curvilinear nebulae" discovered before 1850.

One supernova has been discovered in NGC 7331 so far: SN 1959D, discovered by Milton Humason at 32"W and 13"N of the galaxy's nucleus. This supernova became as bright as 13.4 mag (see IAUC 1682 and PASP 105, 1250)."

 

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This image is compiled from 28 - 10 minute luminance images and 7 - 10 minutes each for the RGB data. A total of 8 hours and 10 minutes of data used. All data was acquired using MaxImDl/CCD version 4.56. Images were reduced and saved in MaxIm. The data was then brought into CCDStack where bloom removal, alignment, and sigma reject was performed to produce the individual master channels by summing the luminance and median combining for the color. The RGB data was taken at bin 2x2 while the luminance data was bin 1x1. Back in MaxIm, the RGB was combined using G2V star calculations as a RGB image and double sized to match the luminance. The two resulting images were aligned and saved. Photoshop CS 2 was used for curves and levels on both images. The masters showed a gradient so I used Russell Croman's excellent GradientXTerminator program to remove the gradients before combining the luminance and RGB images. I saturated the color a bit after creating the LRGB image. The image data was collected over August 27-28 and September 17-18.

Equipment and Location Information

Date August 26-27, 2006
Location Dogwood Ridge Observatory
Optics OGS10" RC @ f/9
Mount Astro Physics AP1200GTO
Camera SBIG ST10XME w/ AO7
Conditions Temperature middle  60's with extremely variable seeing. Transparency good to so so.

    
  Last Modified :01/23/09 12:40 AM