The Triangulum galaxy

The Triangulum galaxy, M33, is located in the northern constellation Triangulum. As seen from Earth it has a really wide angular size thanks to its proximity to our Milky Way. M33 is over 50,000 light-years in diameter, and it’s located some 3 million light-years away from the Solar System, third largest in our Local Group of galaxies after M31 and the Milky Way. 

If we inspect the image closely we can see tens of small blue clusters of stars. The pinkish regions are shown thanks to the use of a Ha filter that captures the emission data from these HII active star forming regions. The most apparent of those regions is NGC 604, the brightest in this galaxy (bottom left of the image).

To capture this colorful image I used my dual Takahashi setup. I gathered data from both FSQ’s (FSQ85 and FSQ106), but I only processed the data from FSQ85 in an exercise to see the performance of my full set of Baader filters (LRGBHa). I would like to specially thank Valkanik astronomy shop for their support with the testing of these filters.

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