Month: September 2021

This is M33, the “Triangulum Galaxy”.

Very very roughly, given all the uncertainties about the size of your screen and how close you are, this view is about not too far from naked eye size.

Here’s an image of the moon with the same equipment, same magnification:

About the view you would get through binoculars.

The moon is half a degree wide; M33 is a little over one degree, but that includes dim reaches that don’t show in the  photograph above.

I posted a picture of the Andromeda galaxy a few days ago at the same scale.  It is much larger, about three degrees wide.  (Most of the astrographs I post are with the same tiny 61mm telescope and camera, so the scale for all of them is similar. )

The sky goes on forever, and it is littered  with amazing giant things, only slightly hidden from us.

AKA M27.  Some pictures may look like a dumbbell, but this one doesn’t.  It looks so small and alone, but it is 1.4 light years in diameter, and nearly 1300 light years away from us.

It doesn’t know about us…

I tried a fairly major software change on my imaging setup, but it was a failure. — I couldn’t make it work.  Even worse, the tracking software  several times ran the telescope into the tripod and ground the gears in the mount in a very frightening way.  So I went back to the previous setup.  Fortunately, the Andromeda Galaxy  is now visible, and I was able to get a nice image, to prove that things were still working.  Everyone has seen this a million times, but it never gets old:

Edit: here’s an improved version of the above image — more exposures, better processing.  Barely noticeable at mobile device scale, but full size you can see the difference…