After more years than I care to admit, the observatory is operational again. With support from a fellow enthusiast, I spent the time over Labor Day weekend to sort out all of my PC driver issues and get the computer speaking to the mount, telescope, focuser, rotator, and camera. Gathering data on the long weekend and mid-month, I was able to get this image of NGC 7331.

NGC 7331 is 40 million light years from Earth. The smaller galaxies in the lower part of the image are approximately 10 times farther away and so this is not a gravitationally bound group. The common name for this group is the Deer Lick Group. I imaged this galaxy group on my Celestron C-11 in 2011, with my Televue NP-101 in a wide view in 2009, and it was one of my early targets with the C-11 in 2006. The 2006 image was taken from West Los Angeles. All of the others were taken from my observatory in Lake Riverside. (Please note that the company and product names are separate links so you can find out both about their current products as well as my older ones.)

This image (that’s a link to my gallery) consists of 230 minutes of total exposure time: 110 minutes of luminance (all colors) and 40 minutes each of red, green, and blue. All of the data was collected in 5 minute exposures and combined using the LRGB method to create this final image. If you are interested, I wrote a post in 2017 that describes how these exposures are cleaned up and turned into a final image.

The data was captured on an SBIG ST-10, my workhorse CCD camera for almost 15 years. The telescope is a Planewave CDK 12.5 reflector. It is mounted on an Astro-Physics AP-1200 mount. The data were captured using Maxim DL, orchestrated by CCD Commander. My observatory software is The Sky X. For focusing, I use FocusMax.

The journey to this image was not smooth. We had three nights of imaging time over the Labor Day weekend. I used the first to get everything connected and calibrated. On the second, I captured data. My general order of imaging on a rising object (NGC 7331 was rising in the east when I took the data) is red, green, blue, then luminance. I was surprised that the blue filter seemed to be producing the brightest images when that should be the luminance filter. I realized on the third imaging night that I had my filter order incorrect and that, in fact, what I had set up as the blue filter was actually the luminance filter. So that final night I took almost two hours of data through the “blue” filter.

After poking around on my old computer and with different software, I determined the correct filter order. But there was another problem. The color data were very poor, and my calibration frames (see the data reduction post) were very poor. I was able to get back out to the observatory later in September and take a new set of color data. That was married with the not blue but luminance data in PixInsight to create this final image.

I am very happy to have the observatory operating again. Without the moral support of the friend who helped me while he got his imaging working, I’d have put it off again. It’s great to have a real deep-space image back in the blog and the gallery.