Triangulum Galaxy

November 3, 2019

M33 Triangulum Galaxy with the William Optics SpaceCat and ZWO ASI071 Cooled Camera and a really old Celestron UHC/LPR filter with longpass bands at 450-550 and 600-700--not exactly the dual narrow band passes of a high-end color filter like the STC Astro Duo-NB, but the results are still pretty good. The filter does a decent job of bringing out the OIII and Ha color ranges, which would be washed out in the full mix of broadband with the IR/UV Cut filter (my normal broadband color config). M33 is about 2.7 million light-years away from us, and it's about 600,000 lightyears across, with 40 billion stars. With this bi-color filtered view the Triangulum shows off dozens of large HII regions at the red end of the spectrum--those are the red and pink masses distributed around the galaxy's spiral arms. My conclusion: you know there's some kick-ass deep sky astrophotography going on right now in any of the developed civilizations in M33. Not that we'll ever know for sure, you know, outside our light-cone and all that stuff. Well, not until we crack that thorny faster-than-light travel problem.