NGC 7331 is a barred spiral galaxy that can be found in the Constellation Pegasus. Also known as Caldwell 30, it's sometimes been referred to as the Milky Way's twin. The galaxy was discovered by William Hershel in 1784. It is about 40 million light years from earth in what is known as the NGC 7331 group. Immediately below the group's namesake lies several other group members, namely NGC 7335, NGC 7336, NGC 7337 and NGC 7340. Combined these galaxies forms the 'Deer Lick Group' a name apparently derived from a overlook and gap along the BlueRidge Parkway in North Caroline.

Stephen's Quintet (greyscale image featured in the inset to the right) was first observed by Édouard Stephan in 1877. Four of the galaxies form a gravatationally-linked, compact galaxy group known as Hickson Compact Group 92 - it was the first such compact group ever discovered. The group has been extensively studied, and was the target for one of the inaugural images by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Data for this image was acquired over five pristine nights between September 28 and October 3 at the Okie-Tex Star Party located in near Kenton, Oklahoma. I used my Stellarview 115 triplet and an Atik 460EX to capture the data. All of this was run under the N.I.N.A. platform. Dithering was performed every four subs. I used the 'drizzle' functon in Nebulosity to upsample the image by 2x when stacking the images so there would be a high enough pixel density to print to 11" x 14".

The field of view used to acquire the image is shown in the Imaging Details box. The image above is reduced in size (to roughly 13% scale). Clicking the image above will open up a much larger (50%) version. All images are cropped to some degree.

Imaging Details
Imaging Dates	Sept 28-Oct 3, 2024
Imaging Location	Okie-Tex Star Party (+36.53, -102.57)
Constellation	Pegasus
Imaging Telescope	Stellarvue 115 fluorite triplet
Imaging Camera	Atik 460EX
Imaging Filter(s)	L, R, G, B, Ha
Exposures	R,G,B - 180 sec, L - 120 sec, Ha - 300 sec.
Guiding	50mm f/4 guide scope, 2x Barlow, Lodestar X2, PhD Guiding
Image Processing	Pre-processing (darks, flats) done with Photoshop CS5. Sub alignment performed with Nebulosity; Photoshop CS5 used to process the stacked subs. StarNet used to remove stsars. Topaz DeNoise AI used to reduce noise and sharpen the image.