Captured with my 61mm WO doublet.  I had intended to present this as the Intergalactic Traveler's view, i.e. with Milk Way foreground stars removed, but found that the smaller size of M31 made for a less dramatic presentation than with my previous

The Intergalactic Traveler's view of M31, The Andromeda Galaxy version of M31.  Certainly, as the disk of a galaxy gets smaller on the sky, the less foreground stars impact its view.  So a smaller galaxy will benefit from such treatment.  Still, I do present the IG traveler's view of M33 as the mouseover for those who might be interested.  Since these are the two largest (Northern Hemisphere) galaxies, I do not plan on presenting this sort of thing much in the future, though I might try with some of the more dramatic galaxy clusters if taken at sufficiently wide field of view.  But those distant galaxies will not have the benefit of showing the stars that are part of the disk, which we cannot resolve with our rigs.  

This version of M33 just looks a whole lot different than my M31 (Being so evidently more blue in color).  Yet I treated this largely the same as my M31, with only basic stretch (some contrast enhancement) after SPCC.  And as typically seen with M33, the presentation shows us a pretty blue galaxy.  I could go on about how it is thought that M33 has about 10x the star-forming activity of M31, or how M33 has no central disk bulge.  All this would point to M33 having a much larger contingent of younger stars.  And we know there really are no old blue stars.  M33 is also a small spiral.  Considered a pure spiral, and unlike most larger spirals, contains arms that extend deeply into the center.  That includes the young blue stars that generally are not found in the centers of spirals, spiral bars or central bulges.  All that I write in the previous couple of sentences maybe sounds like justification for the difference in my colors.  Even with that justification, I still have doubts...  But then do I simple not trust SPCC?  I picked the same parameters in SPCC to do this job.  So, what do you think?

To reiterate; simple processing, as far as color and stretching.  I did some deconvolution, star halo reduction and even star reduction in the "Earth View", since my 61mm aperature makes fat stars.  Also, I tried some contrast enhancement, but reversed most of that.  Yes, once again, no H alpha signal.  Reds can be found, but you have to look closely.  My small aperature also tends to lose the many normally visible blue and red supergiants, which are much more abundant in M33 on a square parsec basis than in M31.  I would love a quality 100-120mm refractor, with the same field of view!  I wanted this to be a non-enhanced view of these two galaxies.   For the "Traveler's View", I put back many of the field galaxies/smudges that StarXTerminator destroys and also made sure that the stars that are part of M33 were there, and if not, put back into proper place (all based on my logical guesses).

Other facts about M33, aside from the star-forming rate I mentioned above:  It is much smaller than M31 and the Milky Way galaxy, yet is the third largest member of our close local group.  M33 has far fewer stars, or on the basis of total star mass.  Not just dimensionally, but also M33 has no extended star halo as known for M31 and found also to likely be present for the Milky Way.  No central bulge, typically associated with the presence of a super massive black hole, suggests that there is not a super massive black hole in M33.  Not even the size of the Milky Way's relatively puny one.  However, M33's center holds one of the more active galactic nuclei of the local group.  It is thought that this is the result of the activity of a much smaller, mid sized BH.