[Reprocessed from scratch following advice received on PI support forum (thanks!)]

The Triangulum Galaxy is the third-largest member of the Local Group of galaxies, which includes the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy and about 30 other smaller galaxies. It is one of the most distant permanent objects that can be viewed with the naked eye: approximately 3 million light years from Earth .

Triangulum may be home to 40 billion stars, compared to 400 billion for the Milky Way, and 1 trillion (1000 billion) stars for Andromeda

[description adapted from wikipedia]

All sub exposures were acquired from Lake Sonoma on Oct, 5 2013.

L: 3 hours (9 x 20m unbinned)

R, G, B: 2 hours each (12 X 10m binned 2x2)

Total exposure time: 9 hours

Notes: I picked this large galaxy to test a new focal reducer from Astrotech, which steps down my telescope from f/7 to f/5.5 - which should help framing the larger nebulae and speeding up photon captures especially for narrowband imaging.

I made the mistake to bin the color exposures (which yielded a really poor 4px/arcsec scale - way too coarse!). I should have kept a 1x1 binning to preserve the nice details in the core of the galaxy and the stars around it, which appear to be obviously under sampled.

Processing-wise, M33 isn't easy. it's really hard to bring out the details in the faint arms of the galaxy without blowing out its really bright core, which is itself filled with nice intricate details.

The red star-forming regions which dot the galaxy would benefit from some exposure in Ha, but it's hard to get more than 9 hours of continuous imaging time in a single night this time of the year in California.

At some point I will have to revisit this target with a longer focal length (i.e. no reducer).

Equipment:

Main Camera: QSI 583 WSG

Guide Camera: SXV Lodestar (on OAG)

Mount: Astro-Physics Mach 1

Scope: Explore Scientific 102 f/7 with 0.8x Focal reducer (FL: 560mm)

Image Aquisition software MaximDL

Registed, Calibrated and Stacked in MaximDL

Post Processed with PixInsight 1.8 and Photoshop CS6

Astrometry annotations:

RA 01h 33m 46.9s, Dec +30° 38' 02.1"

Orientation: 0.84 deg E of N

Pixel scale: 2 arcsec/pixel