Image obtained 11-07-2015 through RVO's Megrez 80mm refractor with Orion field-flattener lens, using a Baader-modified Canon XSi DSLR and BackyardEOS image-acquisition software – 20 (of 24 obtained) carefully selected and stacked 260-second luminance frames as well as 8 (of 10 obtained) 200-second luminance frames combined with multiple dark, flat and bias calibration frames shot at ISO 1600 and totaling more than 300 minutes (~114 minutes effective luminance) were used to create this image; optics driven by the Losmandy G-11 mount equipped with Ovision's precision RA worm gear, guided with an Orion SSG3 Monochrome CCD camera using Maxim DL Pro and post-processed with DeepSkyStacker and Photoshop CS3.

(This vertical configuration of M33 is a cropped and spun enlargement of the original image.)

 

---

 

from the web: "The Triangulum Galaxy (also known as M33) that is about 3 million light-years away from Earth. While its mass is not well understood — one estimate puts it between 10 billion and 40 billion times the sun's mass — what is known is it's the third largest member of the Local Group, or the galaxies that are near the Milky Way. Triangulum also has a small satellite galaxy of its own, called the Pisces Dwarf Galaxy.

Under dark sky conditions, M33 is just barely visible with the naked eye in the constellation Triangulum, just west of Andromeda and Pisces."

 

[copyright Rabbit Valley Observatory/Willis Greiner, 2015 -- all rights reserved]