NGC 7331 Group of Galaxies and Stephan's Quintet
NGC 7331 and Stephan's Quintet
Object: NGC 7331 Group of Galaxies and Stephan's Quintet in Pegasus
Equipment: Takahashi FSQ-106N on EM-200; SBIG STL-11000M, Astrodon filters; Vixen 70X600 guidescope
Exposure/Processing: RGB - 5 x 300s; 3 x 300s luminance; Images acquistion/processing in MaximDL ad Photoshop.
Location/Date: 08 October 2010; Chiefland Astronomy Village

Description: NGC 7331 and galaxies in the Deer Lick Group of Galaxies in the right side of the field and Stephan's quintet is in the left side of the field. The spiral galaxy NGC 7331 is about 50 million light-years distant in the northern constellation Pegasus. The background galaxies are about one tenth the apparent size of NGC 7331 and so lie roughly ten times farther away. Their strikingly close alignment on the sky with NGC 7331 occurs just by chance. The visual grouping of galaxies is also known as the Deer Lick Group.
Stephan's Quintet, as its name implies, is a group of five galaxies (NGC7317, 7318A, 7318B, 7319 and 7320) in the constellation Pegasus. Four of the galaxies are 290 million light years distant; one is 40 million light years away (entry collated from NASA APOD and Wikipedia websites).