M33 – The Triangulum Galaxy

20-01-04 M33

This is a very sad sort of thing to be pleased with, but I am!  On the left is the Triangulum constellation with alpha Triangulum near the center bottom, in the right top corner is Mirach in Andromeda.  The faint puff of gray off to the right about 1/3 of the way from alpha Tri to Mirach is the Triangulum galaxy!

This was 7 shots at 30 seconds with the Canon T3i, 50mm lens at f/2.8, and ISO 800.  The shots were stacked with Deep Sky Stacker then adjusted with Rawtherapee.  I picked the best 7 of 9 shots to stack and used the recommended parameters, in Rawtherapee I just played with the various sliders.  Black point is set to 5176, Shadow Compression to 0, Lightness to -6, and Contrast to +61.  All of those had some effect but Black and Shadow Compression probably the most.

My plan had been to shoot for 60 seconds at f/3.5 ISO 800 which is a bit more light but there is too much sky glow in my back yard.  My best shot of Bode’s Galaxy and the Cigar Galaxy was 60 seconds f/4 ISO 400.

The thumbnails below are just reminding me what the DSS and Rawtherapee screens look like:

UPDATE: Below is a further overprocessed image from rawtherapee and the corresponding settings. I note that in the original image I could see a bit of M31 the andromeda Galay in the top right. If I could reliably frame the two galaxies in would be an interesting image. Also, the jumble near the center of the original is NGC752 – an open cluster.

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