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The spectacular M33 Triangulum galaxy contains some of the largest known stellar nurseries, the most prominent is NGC 604 which is about 1500 light years across. The hydrogen gas within the nebula is ionised by ultra violet radiation from a cluster of about 200 massive blue stars (if you look very closely at the image below you can almost see some of them. Since I couldn’t fit M33 into my field of view, I decided to centre the image on this object. The LRGB image below was taken with my Esprit 150 and represents about 8 hours integration time.

15x240s@ISO800 Colour (EOS650D) 15x240s@ISO800 HII (EOS1000D FSM + 12nm HII)

M33 The Triangulum Galaxy 22.09.2017 Atik 314L and William Optics FLT-110 10 x 60 seconds and 10 x 120 seconds Luminance filter only

Skywatcher 150P-DS Celestron AVX Mount Nikon D5200 2 Minute Exposures 55 Subs 1 Hour 50 Minutes Integration Time ISO 3200 Manually Stacked and Processed in Photoshop CS2 (My relationship with DSS isn't that good)

Taken with Atik Infinity Camera 60 mins duration, preprocessed in AstroArt and Star Tools, processed in Photoshop

I gave this quite a long exposure with the H alpha filter (c7.5 hours) since I wanted to capture the various hydrogen clouds. The image represents about 15 hours of integration. CCDstack used for calibration, stacking and error rejection. Pixinsight for DBE, BN and Colour Calibration, PS for everything else. The major challenge with this image is that it contained various scattered light "rainbows" that where generated by out of view bright stars, one of these "rainbows" passed straight through the galaxy. To eliminate the scattered light issue I followed the PS tutorial by Adam Block in his "cosmic canvas" series - this is an amazingly effective technique to eliminate/reduce the problem. LIGHTS: L:15, R:9, G:10, B: 12 x 600s; H: 15 x 1800s. DARKS:30; BIAS:100; FLATS:40 all at -20C.

I'm pleased with this image given that the first subframe was smeared badly due to tracking errors caused by cloud. That cleared and stayed away until 5 minutes after the last frame that I took. I'm delighted with the detail that I captured, especially that of NGC604 (the red blob in the lower right). M33 is a spiral galaxy approximately 3Mly from Earth and is part of our local group of galaxies. It is believed that it is a satellite galaxy of M31 (the Andromeda Galaxy) due to their gravitational interactions. NGC604 and NGC595 are large H II regions in the galaxy and are highly active. NGC604 is approximately 1500 light years across, over 40 times larger than the Orion Nebula and over 6300 times more luminous. If you want more details the astrobin link is: http://www.astrobin.com/269625/

M33 - Triangulum galaxy 10 lights frames 10 Darks frames 20 Flats frames 30 Bias frames Nikon D200, 3 min exposures, ISO 1600.

Wide field around Mirach Shows the relative position and size of M31 and M33. To the far left is Schedar (a-Cass). Just below it is a tiny nebula (NGC 281). 22 2 min subs, flats, darks and bias

I've often wondered how my post processing skills have changed over the years, so I decided to find out by extracting some data which I acquired c2.5 years ago and performing a reprocess on M33. The LRGB image with an Ha blend into the red channel represents just over 15 hours and was taken with my ED80 on my NEQ6. The main post processing differences are: - I corrected for a slight camera tilt via PS, this results in slightly oddly shaped stars towards the edges of the frame. You should be able to see theses defects in the old image if you zoom in. - PI's Photometric Colour Calibration was used on the new image. - PI's HDMRT was used on the Lum to increase the contrast (before I used the PS High Pass Filter) - PI's Dark Script Enhance was used to enhance the galaxies dust lanes. So, still a mixture of PS and PI but now with more PI. Alan (My original result from 2.5 years ago is in the album Deep Sky II).

Imager: Sky-Watcher Evostar 80ED DS-Pro, Sky-Watcher 0.85x Focal Reducer, Canon EOS 500D (Unmodified), Hutech IDAS LPS P2 2", APT - Astro Photography Tool Guider: Orion ST80, QHY 5, PHD 2 Mount: Sky-Watcher NEQ6, AstroTortilla, EQMod Processing: PixInsight 1.8 Dates: Friday 31st October, 2014 LIghts: 61 x 300seconds ISO400 (~5.1 hours) Darks: 109 Flats: 100 Bias: 330 (Processed Using PixInsight SuperBias module). I tried three different integrations in PixInsight - normal, Bayer Drizzle (1x with 1.0 drop size) and Drizzle 2x with 0.9 drop size. The Bayer drizzle did a better job on the colour as you'd expect - less bleeding of colour in/out of stars, but resolution and overall quality doesn't seem much better than standard integration. This version presented above uses the standard drizzle to produce a 2x larger image with much better resoluton. There is a noticeable difference in the size of small stars, roundness of larger stars and many more tiny stars in the galaxy arms. Even when downsampled for presentation (5x in this case) the image is much superior.

Since the skies are not playing along, might as well learn how to process these images better, so old data but reprocessed. Canon 7D with Canon 500mm f/4 L IS @ f/4, ISO 1600. Astrotrac TT320 mount. 35 x 60 second Lights 25 x Bias 25 x Darks 25 x Flats Taken near Horncastle in Lincolnshire

As normal, 150P on NEQ6 with QHY5 finderguider SXV-H9 with Baader LRGBHa filter set in Brightstar manual wheel Guiding, capture, calibration, stacking and log stretch with Maxim, deconvolution with CCDsharp, final tweaks with Photoshop Just a quicky really: 10x8min L 6x5min each RGB (2x2) 6x10min Ha

After great advice by Harry Page on pushing PixInsight's DBE tool to the max I reprocessed my M33 with some interesting results! Here in edit 4, I darkened the sky a bit, and upped the red in the Ha regions. Then I used PixInsight's DSE - Dark Structure Enhance scipt - a wavelet function to make the dust more interesting, and the galaxy itself then got a dose of unsharp mask in photoshop. This is 6h 15m total exposure. 5 min subs. Orion 8"RC at f8/1600mm iOptron iEQ45 SXVR-M25C OSC SW ED80 and Lodestar guiding Nebulosity 3.0 Capture PHD Guiding - dithered AstroArt Preprocessing and Stacking PI and PS CS5 Edit

M33 yet again!

M33 The Triangulum Galaxy Taken on 5th and 10th November 2012 from South Oxfordshire, UK. TS90 APO scope @ f/6.9; CG-5 mount; Atik 460ex camera guided with QHY IMG0H and PHD. L - 4 x 1200 sec & 25 x 600 sec R - 5 x 600 sec G - 5 x 600 sec B - 5 x 900 sec All binned 1x1

This is M33 - the Triangulum Galaxy taken on bonfire night, 2012. It was a bit misty (maybe thanks to the fireworks!) and so the subs were rather noisy. This is 5 1/2 hours of Lum data in 10 minute subs, TS90 APO triplet f/6.7 taken with an Atik 460ex, guided with IMG0H and PHD. Stacked and stretched in AstroArt 5.0 with application of a low pass filter to try to treat the background noise.

This is M33 - the Triangulum Galaxy taken on bonfire night, 2012. It was a bit misty (maybe thanks to the fireworks!) and so the subs were rather noisy. This is 5 1/2 hours of Lum data in 10 minute subs, TS90 APO triplet f/6.7 taken with an Atik 460ex, guided with IMG0H and PHD.

This is M33 - the Triangulum Galaxy taken on bonfire night, 2012. It was a bit misty (maybe thanks to the fireworks!) and so the subs were rather noisy. This is 5 1/2 hours of Lum data in 10 minute subs, TS90 APO triplet f/6.7 taken with an Atik 460ex, guided with IMG0H and PHD.

M33 with Canon 450D (unmodded) on HEQ5 Pro GOTO, guided with finder guider QHY5, SW 130pds 2 sessions combined October 2013 137x 300s Lights (reduced by a couple of airplanes...) at ISO 1600 44x Flats 41x Bias 40x Darks Edited with PS CS5 (64bit)