What am I looking at?

[groberts]

With a lovely clear sky all night on Monday I had a long session using my WO GT81 & Canon 700D imaging various features as they moved towards and passed the meridian: Eastern Veil, NGC 7814, M33 & M34.  Without guiding (yet) I managed to get my best ever polar alignment - in the absence of any northerly view as my house is in the way - and achieved exposures of 120 to 180 seconds and probably could have gone higher; previously this has only been 40 to 90 seconds max.

I recently came across NGC 7320 and its spatially related Stephan's Quintet and as this too passed the optimum meridian position too thought I'd give it a go.  It's clear (I think?) that this is probably a step too far for the WO GT81 and probably requires something a lot bigger to capture those photons that have travelled 300 million light years to get here but with such a good alignment it was worth a try.  Now I've had a preliminary look at the resulting stacked picture (pre-cropping & final post processing) etc I'm not completely sure what I've got.

At first I thought that the obvious and rather nice galaxy highlighted in the square box was NGC 7320 but it was too far to the right and on taking a closer look + checking in Cartes de Ciel I'm now thinking its NGC 7331 and the Deer Lick group of galaxies and Stephan's Quintet is that smudge of light in the circle, close to the centre where I originally expected it to be.

Any thoughts please?

   

[Martin Meredith]

Hi

Yes, that's definitely Stephan's in the encircled region and NGC7331 off to the right.

Martin