‘Aye, the nachts are fair drawin’ in’ and there is a definite autumnal chill in the air. My first image since returning from the North, comprises just under 4 hours integration using 120s exposures. A high haze and a waning last quarter moon produced inevitable gradients, but APP has done a fairly good job of suppressing these.
Calibrated and stacked, the original image was also processed in APP, with just a little smoothing (3 pixel median blur) and noise reduction (GreyStoration) in Nebulosity v4. Revision B is the APP stack processed in Startools, using a standard workflow, and revision C a crop of the two main galaxy clusters in this image - the 'deer lick' group and Stephan's quintet.
A popular target with amateurs and professionals alike, NGC 7331 is a beautiful unbarred spiral with a counter-rotating core, about 120,000 LY across. It lies 40 mLY away in front of a group of galaxies 300 mLY away. Stephan's quintet lies at a similar distance, with the distinctly bluish NGC 7320 a foreground object at ~39 mLY. There are many fine images of these galaxy groups on Astrobin, but those from
HST and more recently the
JWST are extraordinary in their detail, and depth. I was pleased to get a hint of detail and colour in some of these.
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