NGC7331 and surroundings

[Leonardo70]

After seeing the photos of Ken and Martin (:eyepop: renew my congratulations to them), I must say that it takes a lot of courage to post my realization of NGC7331 :rolleyes:. In any case, i apologize in advance, here is what I managed to get with my equipment after several nights of work:

http://www.starkeeper.it/NGC7331RC.htm

Greetings to all, and thanks for looking.
Leo

[multiweb]

Mate, nothing to shy about. It's a superb shot and you're happy with it. That's all that matters. :thumbsup:

[Lester]

Thanks for the view Leo, fantastic.

[allan gould]

Awesome photograph and you really have done the galaxy justice.

[cybereye]

Leo,

A fantastic image!! I felt that I was being drawn into the centre of the galaxy - an amazing image. :thumbsup:

Ciao,
Mario

[atalas]

Leo,excellent! wonderful color,great detail and very deep! inspirational.

[SkyViking]

Very nice!

[Martin Pugh]

Absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is a super image.
cheers
Martin

[Leonardo70]

Thank you to everyone who watched and commented on the image. Thanks Martin, your images are a reference for my work.

Ciao,
Leo

[CoolhandJo]

Very nice inspiring image.

[Stevec35]

Nothing to be humble about there Leo. Lovely image!

Cheers

Steve

[strongmanmike]

Yeh great shot Leo, has all the bits one expects in a Deer Lick image :thumbsup:

Mike

[Ross G]

A great photo Leo.

You should be proud.

Thanks.

Ross.

[Leonardo70]

Thank you to all ... :thanx:

Ciao,
Leo

[John Hothersall]

That RC certainly does produce detail and 7331's core has come out very well, love the spiral arms in the galaxy above 7331.

John.

[Star Catcher]

Excellent image Leonado!

Ted

[madbadgalaxyman]

Very nice work, Leonardo,

The image looks good and deep.

Is there any sign of unusual or asymmetric optically luminous material outside of the main body of NGC 7331 when you display your imaging data at the highest contrast and brightness?

Another question is, what does the bulge (inner spheroidal) component of this galaxy look like,when the image is reproduced at a more lifelike scaling?
(The characteristic stretch adopted by both professional and amateur astronomers wipes out the bulge component of a galaxy, so we actually lose information when we try to display the outermost portions of a galaxy)

You may be aware that the most recent galaxy atlas, "The De Vaucouleurs Atlas of Galaxies", adopts a similar image scaling (that is, a logarithmic scale), so the displayed images in this atlas tell us only about the planar disk component of spiral and S0 galaxies.....and tell us nothing about the prominence or shape of the spheroidal component in these galaxies.

A good corrective to these stretched "disk component only" images are the old-fashioned chemical process images in the Carnegie Atlas of Galaxies, which have no fancy processing whatsoever. These images preserve information about the bulge component of galaxies.

[Peter.M]

I have just started out doing astrophotography, and on these forums in general. But this is the kind of image that I aspire too.

[Leonardo70]

:thanx:

Robert, i tried to put 2 image, one high stretched and one linear stretched on the bulge ... i hope this give a response to your interesting question:

No elaboration on this 2 image:
http://www.starkeeper.it/img/L_Core_NoStr.jpg
http://www.starkeeper.it/img/L_HiStr.jpg

Please let me know your consideration about.

All the best,
Leo

[mill]

Very nicely done and perfect colors.

[madbadgalaxyman]

Leo,

The bulge looks normal on the image you have displayed that emphasizes this feature of NGC7331 ; the bulge is observed to extend far above the plane of this galaxy, on both sides, as one would expect for a three-dimensional structure that is spheroidal.
But appearances can be deceptive...... because we get only a two-dimensional image in the telescope, and it has turned out that it is actually a difficult (non-trivial) task to derive the actual three-dimensional structures in galaxies from their two-dimensional images.

When this image is displayed at high brightness and contrast, the outline of this galaxy does display a high degree of symmetry and regularity.

Your other image Clearly shows a discrete and well-defined inner Ring or Disk structure within NGC 7331, which is also quite obvious at several different wavelengths:

100669


_________________________________
Nearly all of the prominent galaxies in the NGC 7331 field are at a much higher redshift than the big spiral; so they are actually far in the background. Oddly, the exception to this rule is actually a member of Stephan's Quintet : NGC 7320

(I am excluding from consideration, here, several candidate dwarf spheroidal companions of NGC 7331)

The recession velocity of NGC 7320 is closely similar to that of NGC 7331, so the most straightforward interpretation of this is that NGC 7320 is at a similar distance to NGC 7331 (despite all the "conspiracy theories" about this on the internet! )
Furthermore, NGC 7320 has an optically luminous streamer or tail that points towards NGC 7331, and this does provide some evidence for an interaction between these two galaxies.

Added information, in a later edit:
Halton Arp presented an image processing analysis of photographic plates of this field in (1976), Astrophysical Journal, Volume 210, page 58.
As is usual for old papers, the scan of the paper that can be found at //adsabs.harvard.edu is really ratty, so a more useful thing to do would be to access the paper (physical) version of this article.

It is obviously time for me to catch up on the literature about N7331!

[RobF]

Stunning object and wonderful picture.
I love the luminosity appearing below the object and shining through the dust lane and outer spirals. Not to mention all the other little blighter in the field.

Love it :)