M33 - The Triangulum Galaxy (Wide-field)

galaxies

M33 gets its name from the Triangulum constellation in which it can be found. At magnitude 5.7, it can be seen with the naked eye under the right conditions and is located about 3 million light years away – slightly farther than the larger and more prominent neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, and quite a bit smaller, too – about 40 billion stars, about 1/5 the size of the Milky Way.

This widefield image of M33 is was taken in Dec 2013. Taken with a DSLR using a Hyperstar f/2 lens, the image consists of about 60 120s exposures and 60 60s exposures.

Comment from Nov 17, 2015: Having taken this image about 2 years ago and annotating it now for the site, I forgot how much light gathering ability the Hyperstar at f/2 has!

Resolution ........ 1.592 arcsec/pix
Rotation .......... 66.451 deg (flipped)
Focal ............. 583.16 mm
Pixel size ........ 4.50 um
Field of view ..... 2d 7' 20.0" x 1d 20' 38.6"
Image center ...... RA: 01 33 58.324  Dec: +30 38 34.50