NGC7332 and NGC7339: NGC7332 (on the right) is a mag 11 lenticular galaxy, appearing about 4 arcminutes long; NGC7339 (on the left) is a mag 12.3 spiral galaxy, appearing about 2.8 arcminutes long. Both are about 60 million light years away. The two amost certainly orbit each other.

Technical Information:

LRGB: 345:75:75:75 (All channels consisted of unbinned fifteen minute images).

Equipment: Meade 12" RCX400 at f/8.5, an SBIG ST-8XE camera/CFW-8 color filter wheel with Astrodon filters, guided by an SBIG AO-7 adaptive optics device, guiding at about 10 Hz (luminance) and 8 Hz (RGB).

Image Acquisition/Camera Control: CCDSoft V5.

Processing: All images calibrated (darks, dawn flats and flat-darks) and registered in CCDSoft. Luminance layer average combined in Ray Gralak's sigma reject program; RGB channels median combined in CCDSoft. Lucy-Richardson deconvolution routine applied to luminance layer using AIP4WIN. Color combine in Photoshop. Very gentle unsharp mask and gaussian blurs applied to parts of the luminance layer, and adjustment of curves and levels, performed in Photoshop 6.0.

Location: All images taken in my yard in Redmond, WA, USA, elevation 500'.

Date: Luminance images taken on the night of August 8, 2005; RGB taken on the night of August 9, 2005.

CCD Temperature: -20C

Moon Phase: Very early waxing crescent moon

Image Scale: .8 Arcseconds per pixel

Seeing: Variable; 1.9 - 2.3 Arcsecond FWHM in single calibrated images.

Copyright Mark de Regt, 2005