Celestial hemisphere:  Northern  ·  Constellation: Triangulum (Tri)  ·  Contains:  M 33  ·  NGC 598  ·  NGC 604  ·  Triangulum Galaxy  ·  Triangulum Pinwheel
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M33 (LRGBH), rhedden
M33 (LRGBH)
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M33 (LRGBH)

Getting plate-solving status, please wait...
M33 (LRGBH), rhedden
M33 (LRGBH)
Powered byPixInsight

M33 (LRGBH)

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Description

M33 is the famous Triangulum galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the sky based on angular size.   This image was taken at f/5.5 and 550 mm with the Esprit 100ED SuperApo refractor and the QHY268M mono CMOS camera. 

Since all of the frames were taken from home in my Bortle 4/5 backyard, removing some light pollution gradients was necessary.  I wish I could have shot the image from a good dark site, but the gradient removal went quite well, fortunately.  The luminance channel is a synthetic channel consisting of all LRGB frames taken with a median combination.  Some modest deconvolution was applied in ImagesPlus to pull out more detail in the spiral arms.

H-alpha frames were added to the LRGB image by merging the H-alpha highlights into the red channel in GIMP.  I decided to forego star size reduction with this image, as I just don't think it's necessary.  The full resolution image shows a lot more detail in the spiral arms of M33 than I was expecting, which was likely the result of excellent seeing and autoguiding on a couple of the nights. 

Overall, this image might be the best I have taken so far with the Esprit 100ED.

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