It may seem like I've given up on landscape photography around here but I have not! Life's been busy this year... Astrophotography, fortunately, I can do from my back yard and it's accomplished at night so it's a bit easier to fit in. Unfortunately I'm going to lose this soon too as Oregon slips into its gray winter...
Anyway, this is a shot of Messier 33 (aka
The Triangulum Galaxy). It's a relatively close neighbor to our Milky Way Galaxy (about the same distance as the famous Andromeda Galaxy though this one is quite a bit smaller). The neat thing about these close galaxies is that it's relatively easy to start to resolve their constituent stars. Although, until photography was applied to astronomy, astronomers believed that the strange 'spiral nebulae' in the heavens were clouds of gas. We now know that each of these amazingly beautiful systems are actually made up of billions of stars... Blows my mind almost every time I think of it.
You can see more than just stars in this one. The pink 'blobs' in the photo are
emission nebulae in M33. The large nebula in the lower left (
NGC 604) is so bright it's often easier to spot than the galaxy itself!
Hit 'L' on your keyboard for a
better view.
Technical info about the image:Object: Messier 33, Triangulum Galaxy
Sky: ~19.5 mag/arcsec^2
Mount: CGEM
Imaging scope: C9.25 at f/6.3
Imaging FL: 1480mm
Imaging camera: SBIG ST-4000XCM
Lights: 140x180s (7h)
Calibration: 7 sky flats, 36 darks (-10C)
Guide scope: Orion 9x50 finder scope
Guide camera: Meade DSI I (2s intervals)
Other details: Images acquired with CCDOPS v5, guided with PHD (using GPUSB), calibrated and stacked using Deep Sky Stacker, post-processed in Photoshop CS5.
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