NGC 7331 Galaxy Group | The Deer Lick Galaxy (Kevin Morefield)

NGC 7331 Galaxy Group | The Deer Lick Galaxy

Displaying a beautiful tight spiral structure right to the core, NGC7331 is the master of it's nearby group of galaxies. Oddly, it is believed that the somewhat tilted core is rotating backwards compared to the outer spiral. I can only assume that this is the innermost part of the core which is not seen here since all structures I see here appear in sync. The nearby closest galaxies are part of the group but I suspect that the diffuse galaxy in the upper right is as well. It appears to be extended toward and away from the larger 7331. However, that may be conincedental.

This is a bit of a field flatness test for the CDK14. This is the extreme edege of my field and was shot as a part of a larger FOV that includes Stephan's Quintet. There is a IFN in the area and it is much stronger around the Quintet. While I work on the larger image attempting to retain and feature the IFN, I thought 7331 deserved an image of its own.

Seeing this Summer at SRO has been fantastic and the smoke has not impeded captures at all. This enabled a cutoff of <2" subs only to be used with a blended FWHM of about 1.7". That resolution is welcome for this object with so much small detail wanting to be resolved. If ever there was an object that called for HDRMT it is 7331. The very bright core blazes away with a bubble of glow above and below the plane of rotation as well. HDRMT completely evens that out - to much so in my opinion. So I blended the HDRMT result back into the original data to try and capture both. If I was to process it again I might leave a bit more of the diffuse bubble, brightening the core a bit more.

The star field is quite bright and two rounds of star reduction were needed to bring the galaxies more to the front.

Original
Final
B

B

Description: Full re-edit using BlurX, StarX, NoiseX, and SPCC.

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Status	Advanced success
Started	...
Astrometry.net job	8009431
PixInsight job	MFHYV1I89G5F0RD58D1IZ66IDIMP6CL2
PixInsight queue size	n/a
PixInsight stage	TASK_LOG

RA (center)	22h37m12s.724
RA (top/left)	22h38m01s.479
RA (top/right)	22h37m23s.379
RA (bottom/right)	22h36m23s.886
RA (bottom/left)	22h37m02s.850

Dec (center)	+34°25′28″.58
Dec (top/left)	+34°20′41″.59
Dec (top/right)	+34°36′22″.41
Dec (bottom/right)	+34°30′13″.66
Dec (bottom/left)	+34°14′33″.14

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