M33

Some people like dairy milk, some like a Wispa me I love a good Galaxy. How about this one. About 2.8 billion light years away. M33 the Triangulum galaxy is part of the local group. I am sure there is another Astro Geek on a planet surrounding one of it's 40 billion stars looking over the galactic fence at us here. A very diffuse object I can't say I have seen it naked eye, others claim too but a wonderful sight in binoculars and a wide field eyepiece. Five hours worth of data for this one.

Image 1 is calibrated in Deep sky stacker and processed in Photoshop.

Image 2 is calibrated in Astro Pixel Processor and processed in Photoshop.

What an incredible difference.

M33 The Triangulum Galaxy.

 The weather recently has been quite good. Forecast was excellent and clear the whole night. No work either for me this week so I decided to go an all nighter. Happy that the mount was working fine, I decided that 10 minute exposures would be the order of play. My Eastern view is excellent and suffers no light pollution so should not be too detremental of the Canon 40D in noise. I managed to grab 220 minutes in total in 10 minute subs. As this is a test for the new set up I have yet to take 10 minute darks, so no darks subtraction. Stacked in DSS and processed in Imagesplus I am pleased with the result. Pic 2 is a reprocess by fellow Blogger Andrew via his pix insight software. Considerable difference in detail. I may just have to invest in. Just not sure if I have the time at present to learn a whole new processing pathway.

M33 The Pinwheel galaxy

I took this pic on the same night as M45 (below). With a great deal of humidity in the air. This was taken before M45 and is just a small stack of 35 x 1 minute exposures at Iso 800 Unguided. It was really just a test of focus and balance really so I wasn't serious about this set. As the night previous I had run a sequence on M37 and M38, having taken a couple of hours worth of photons on processing to find focus was out by probably one tenth of a mm "gutted" Me thinks an electronic focuser is on my christmas list?

With a diameter of about 50,000 light years, the Triangulum galaxy is the third largest member of the Local Group, a group of galaxies which also contains the Milky Way Galaxy and the Andromeda Galaxy, and it may be a gravitationally bound companion of the Andromeda Galaxy. Triangulum may be home to 40 billion stars, compared to 400 billion for the Milky Way, and 1000 billion stars for Andromeda.