I imaged this huge galaxy 2.3 million light years away from our milkwyay using my dedicated astronomy camera, my HEQ5Pro equatorial mount and my Skywatcher 200P telescope.
Total Integration time: 27 minutes
Moon coverage: 50%
Location: Northern Hemisphere
Bortle: 4
M33 or Triangulum galaxy:
The Triangulum Galaxy is a spiral galaxy 2.73 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Triangulum. It is catalogued as Messier 33 or NGC 598. Source Wikipedia
M33 has a relatively bright apparent magnitude of 5.7, making it one of the most distant objects that observers can see with the unaided eye, but only under exceptionally clear and dark skies, definitely not from my back garden on the west coast of Scotland.
Although a telescope will start to reveal some of M33’s spiral features and dust lanes, the galaxy is actually easiest to examine with low magnification and a wide field of view, such as a pair of binoculars or a dobsonian telescope. It is best observed in November which is when I took this image in 2023.
The image above was the second time I had tried to image this galaxy. I first imaged it in 2022, but my equipment was slighty inferior to what it is now and my slightly older EQ5 Pro mount and my previous colour astronomy camera, couldn't quite cut it. At the time I did have a Baader coma corrector which was a big help for my newtonian scope, but it still wasn't enough!
The thing that made the biggest difference, was the addition of the Starizona .75 reducer to my image train and the addition of a CNC spider vein which was a massive help with the collimation of my newtonian telescope and that was astro-life changing to now see how sharp my astro images would become. Oh and collimation to within an inch of my telescopes life!
Now in all honesty, processing Triangulum is a bit of a pain as there are so many stars in this galaxy, it is estimated that there are approximately 40 billion sun like stars, in this massive galaxy, so by the laws of probability, there will absoultely be some form of intelligent life in there somewhere, but it is just so far away that even travelling at 99.9% the speed of light would take 5.6 billion years to get there and back and I had to use chat GPT for that!
But after reading Brian Cox's book 'What is E=mc2 and how does the affect us' I now understand that time dilation would affect the traveller too and so even though 5.6 billion years had passed on earth, the traveller would have experienced 244,000 years of time passing. Time goes slower for the traveller than that of time on earth, or so I believe or at least from the perspective of the traveller! That's relativity folks! LOL. My goodness that went off on a tangent fast!
Anyway I hope you enjoyed looking at my trianglum galaxy image.
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