M33 Wide Field

M33 Widefield

   M33 galaxy in a widefield view of constellation Triangulum was imaged during a few recent cold, clear nights from my backyard in Florida.  The photons used to make this image took 2.72 Million years to travel from the galaxy to my telescope.  During this period, early human ancestors in Africa evolved from Australopithecines (e.g. Australopithecus africanus) to Homo sapiens.  The Sierra Nevada mountains rose rapidly.  North American continental sediments were deposited at their its augmented by carbonate deposits to form South Florida (Miami and the Florida Keys) as well as Los Angeles and Ventura basins in California.  An astrophotograph is worth more than a thousand words (and a million years).

  
Equipment and processing:   Images were captured December 8 through 10, 2020 in Gainesville FL with a Takahashi E-130D astrograph and SBIG STL-11000M camera.   6.6 hours of LRGB were processed with PixInsight and Photoshop.